Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Jack Gallant (Psychology, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science / University of California, Berkeley)"The Distributed Conceptual Network in the Human Brain"Human behavior is based on a complex interaction between perception, stored knowledge, and continuous evaluation of the world relative to plans and goals. Even seemingly simple tasks such as watching a movie or listening to a story involve a range of different perceptual and cognitive processes whose underlying circuitry is broadly distributed across the brain. One important aspect of this system— the representation of conceptual knowledge in the brain—has been an intense topic of research in cognitive neuroscience for the past 40 years. A recent line of neuroimaging research from my lab has produced highly detailed, high-dimensional functional maps of modal and amodal (or multimodal) semantic representations in individual participants. Based on these findings, we propose a new Distributed Conceptual Network (DCN) theory that encompasses previous th