Agenda

We hear from the ECLT network 2021

"A computational neuroethology perspective on body, expression and action perception"

Beatrice De Gelder 
Professor in the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Neuroscience and Psychology, Maastricht University and ECLT Science Board member

24th September 2021, 3 PM

To participate via ZOOM, please use link.

Abstract:
Survival prompts organisms to prepare adaptive behavior in response to environmental and social threat. But what are the specific features of a conspecific’s appearance that trigger such adaptive behaviors?
For social species, the prime candidates for triggering defense systems are visual features of the face and the body. Here, we propose a novel approach for studying the brain’s ability to gather survival-relevant information from seeing conspecific body features. Specifically, we propose that behaviorally relevant information from body expressions is coded at the levels of midlevel features in the brain. These levels are relatively independent from higher-order cognitive and conscious perception of bodies and emotions. Instead,  the proposed approach is embedded in an ethological framework and mobilizes computational models for feature discovery.

Short bio
Professor Beatrice de Gelder holds degrees in both Philosophy and Psychology, and received her PhD in 1972 from the University of Louvain, Belgium. She began her academic career teaching Philosophy of Science, first in Leiden and then in Tilburg. In the mid nineties de Gelder changed her field of interest to Cognitive Science. She is currently professor in the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Neuroscience and Psychology, Maastricht University.

Her main interests lies in the 4 topics below:
1. Non-conscious recognition in patients with cortical damage.
2. Emotional expression in whole bodies.
3. Face recognition and its deficits.
4. Multisensory perception and the interaction between auditory and visual processes.