Kaleidoscience: Conversations on Cognitive Science

Adrien Doerig is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück. He uses artificial neural networks to study visual processing and is also interested in consciousness research. Mentioned paper: Doerig, A., Sommers, R. P., Seeliger,  K., Richards, B., Ismael, J., Lindsay, G. W., ... & Kietzmann, T. C. (2023). The neuroconnectionist research programme. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 1-20.

Have you ever been in a "flow" state? Sleeping, dreaming, being stressed, being in "flow" - Altered states of consciousness are something we all experience every single day and yet there is a lot more research to be done. Linda Ariel Ventura may only be at the beginning of her academic career, but her enthusiasm for Cognitive Science is already infectious. She is a bachelor student at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück and a member of the Unimind initiative where she researches psychedelic science and altered states of consciousness.

What does solving mysteries of the world have to do with brains? And how does one come from wanting to be a detective to research neural networks? In this episode, we're talking to Viktoria Zemliak. She is currently doing her PhD in the neuroinformatics research group at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück. As in many episodes, we will learn a lot about why a person is fascinated by the human mind and how this person ended up researching in the field of Cognitive Science more by accident than intention.

Dr. Annette Hohenberger is a lecturer for Cognitive Neuropsychology and is especially interested in the Cognitive Development of children. Additionally to the research she is doing, she is also a member of the local Scientists for Future group. Among other things, the Scientists for Future are organizing a lecture series which is also available online. https://osnabrueck.scientists4future.org/ Mentioned paper: Turk-Browne, N. B., Scholl, B. J., & Chun, M. M. (2008). Babies and brains: habituation in infant cognition and functional neuroimaging. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2, 333.

Tracy Sánchez Pacheco is researching social facilitation in spatial navigation as a PhD student at the institute of Cognitive Science. Not only Tracy’s research area is super interesting, also her methods are: She is using Virtual Reality to put her participants into an environment of which she and her colleagues can control almost all aspects. Mentioned/recommended papers: Dalton, R. C., Hölscher, C., & Montello, D. R. (2019). Wayfinding as a social activity. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 142. [Topic: the general relevance of social stimuli in spatial navigation] Kuehn, E., Chen, X., Geise, P., Oltmer, J., & Wolbers, T. (2018). Social targets improve body-based and environment-based strategies during spatial navigation. Experimental Brain Research, 236, 755-764. [Topic: specific social facilitation] Hao, Q. Y., Jiang, R., Hu, M. B., Jia, B., & Wu, Q. S. (2011). Pedestrian flow dynamics in a lattice gas model coupled with an evolutionary game. Physical Review E, 84(3), 036107. [Topic: real-world behavior of people on the streets]

The field of artificial intelligence has changed and grown a lot in the last 20 years. Prof. Kai-Uwe Kühnberger witnessed this change first hand - and was part of it. After studying Mathematics, Philosophy and Linguistics, and doing a PhD in Computational Linguistics, he then worked internationally as a researcher. Since 2009 he is the professor for Artificial Intelligence at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück. Mentioned paper: Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., ... & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in neural information processing systems, 30.

Piper has an interdisciplinary background in Psychology, Neuroscience and Machine Learning and is applying her knowledge in two amazing projects: For one, she is developing a wearable grasping assistant tool for the blind and visually impaired, and she is aiming to understand neural mechanisms to implement them in neuromorphic networks.

Every sentence that we speak can conceal a myriad of meanings. Dr. Asya Achimova is exploring linguistic nuance: While some researchers assume ambiguity to be hindering in communication, Asya Achimova explores how we resolve and intentionally use ambiguous language. She did her PhD in Cognitive Psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey and is currently the substitute professor for Cognitive Modeling at the Institute of Cognitive in Osnabrück.

Sebastian Musslick studied Psychology and Neuroscience, did his PhD at Princeton and is now an Assistant Professor for Computational Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück. Like many of our guests, he is very passionate about his research and is fascinated by the interdisciplinary work between Neuroscientists and Computer Scientists. Recommended paper: Schultz, W., Dayan, P., & Montague, P. R. (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science, 275(5306), 1593-1599.

In many ways, Dr. Dr. Gregor Hörzer incorporates the “CogSci experience” - he studied telematics and by coincidence started visiting philosophy lectures. He ended up doing a PhD in both, studied philosophy of mind and worked as a computational neuroscientist. He is now the dean of studies and study coordinator at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück. Recommended books: Goff, P. (2019): Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. Rider/Penguin. Goff, P. (2023): Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Oxford University Press.