Dartmouth Events

Please join us on Friday, October 9, 2020, at 3:30 p.m., for a virtual colloquium given by Danielle Bassett, J Peter Skirkanich Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Title: Building Mental Models of Our Networked World

Abstract: Human learners acquire not only disconnected bits of information, but complex interconnected networks of relational knowledge. The capacity for such learning naturally depends upon three factors: (i) the architecture of the knowledge network itself, (ii) the nature of our perceptive instrument, and (iii) the instantiation of that instrument in biological tissue. In this talk, I will walk through each factor in turn. l will begin by describing recent work assessing network constraints on the learnability of relational knowledge. I will then describe a computational model informed by the free energy principle, which offers an explanation of how such network constraints manifest in human perception. In the third section of the talk, I will describe how neural representations reflect network constraints. Throughout, I'll move from previously published work to unpublished data, and from the world outside to the world inside, before speculating on as-yet uncharted territory.

Please contact Michelle Powers for Zoom details.