Host: Prof. Li Li, NYU Shanghai
Abstract:
Human brain stores tremendous amount of knowledge about this world, which is the foundation of language, thought, and reasoning. What’s the neural codes of semantic knowledge representation? Is the knowledge “roses are red” simply the memory trace of perceiving the color of roses, stored in the brain circuits within color-sensitive neurons? What about knowledge that is not directly perceived by senses, such as “freedom” or “rationality”? I will present some work from my lab that addresses this issue using cognitive, neuroimaging, and neuropsychological methods with healthy subjects, individuals with sensory deprivation (blind and deaf) or with brain damage. The findings point to a highly distributed system incorporating two different types of information coding – one based on distributed sensory experiences (embodied) and one based on language (symbolic).
Biography:
Yanchao Bi is a ChangJiang professor in IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, at Beijing Normal University. She received her PhD from the Department of Psychology, Harvard University in 2006. Her work focuses on the study of functional and neural architecture associated with knowledge, semantic memory and language, using cognitive, neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and computational methods. She serves on the board of "Society of Neurobiology of Language", the editorial board of Journals Elife, Cognition, Cognitive Neuropsychology, and Neurobiology of Language. She has won various awards, scholarships or recognitions such as “The National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars“, “The National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars”, Sackler scholar of psychophysiology, Fulbright scholar, and “rising star” by the American Psychological Association.