ASSC15 Tutorials
Thursday June 9, 2011
-------------------- Full-Day Tours --------------------
| Tour 1: Tour to the robotics laboratory in the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories. Summary |
| Full-Day *SOLD OUT* |
| In this one-day tutorial (from 9am to 3pm), the participants will take a
train to ATR in Kyoto prefecture (~1 hour from Kyoto) and see the
state-of-the-art Japanese robotics research demonstrations. We hope
those robotics research approaches would provide a fresh viewpoint for
consciousness researchers, showing a future possibility of consciousness
in robots (!?), casting doubt on our perception of consciousness in
other creatures (including human beings), etc.
Note that the
registration will be free for this tutorial. Estimated cost for train
is ~1600 JPY. Lunch will not be provided. Due to the limitation of
the facility, we can host only up to 20 people. Note that we host the
first 20 registrants.
Three laboratories will show their own robots
with demonstration.
(1) Laboratory by Dr. Mitsuo Kawato (ATR)
(demonstration by Dr. Jun Morimoto (ATR) and Dr. Erhan Oztop (ATR)) We introduce our research activities at Dept. of Brain Robot Interface and Dept. of Communications and Cognitive Cybernetics, ATR-BIC. We have been developed motor control and motor learning algorithms for humanoid robot CB-i (Computational Brain-interface). We will show part of the results using CB-i. We are also interested in connecting brains to assistive robots to reconstruct motor function of patients. We will introduce our newly developed assistive exoskeleton robot. In addition, we will also introduce the new Motoman robot arm and show its affordance based control for simple manipulation tasks. The motoman robot is 7DOF robot arm which has similar motion capabilities as of human. (2) Laborartory by Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro (Osaka U & ATR)(demonstration by Dr. Nishio) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WijMCSfX0RA The demostration will show several teleoperated android robots such as Geminoid HI-2, Geminoid F and Telenoid R1/R2. The geminoids are teleoperated android robots that are made to resemble existing real humans. Telenoids are designed to reveal the minimal nature of human beings, so that while still showing enough human likeliness, interlocutors can feel the presence of arbital operators in the remote. These teleoperated robots have been designed to transfer presence of individuals in the remote through teleoperation, as a new communication medium. From another aspect, the geminoids and telenoids can be seen as equipments to separate one's body and mind; that is, while the mind (the operator) is preserved, the body part can be hanged to that of different appearance and body structure and thus can be used as research platform for approaching numbers of philosophical / psychological issues that have not been possible before. (3) Laboratory by Dr. Minoru Asada (Osaka U & JST) Cognitive Developmental Robotics (CDR) is a new cutting-edge cognitive developmental research paradigm to obtain new understanding of learning and developmental mechanisms through implementation of these processes as programs in humanoid robots and examining their behavior. The achievements will bring a new methodology to design umanoid robots which can learn autonomously, adapt themselves to unknown situations, and develop in environments. We have developed several humanoid robots as platforms for CDR, which are designed to be used commonly among researchers not only in the field of robotics but also in human science. Our demonstration will show various kinds of behavior of the developed platforms |
| Tour 2: Tour to the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute. Summary |
| Full-Day *SOLD OUT* |
In this one-day tutorial (from 8am to 4pm), the participants will take a train (or chartered bus) to PRI in Inuyama city located near Nagoya, 2.5 hours away from Kyoto city. Participants will see the chimpanzee facility and observe the cognitive experiments with chimpanzees. Some demonstration video clips can be found in YOUTUBE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJAH4ZJBiN8) and our website (http://www.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ai/video/video_library/index.html). Note that the registration will be free for this tutorial. Estimated cost for train (or chartered bus) is ~15000 JPY. Lunch is available in the restaurant at PRI. Due to the limitation of the facility, we can host only up to 8 people. Note that we host the first 8 registrants. We will require the health check (free from tuberculosis) for the participants.
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------------------Morning Tutorials ------------------
| TUTORIAL 2: “Disorders of Consciousness: Coma, Vegetatitve State and Minimally Conscious State." Summary |
|
| Disorders of consciousness such as coma, the vegetative and minimally
conscious states are among the most mysterious and less understood
pathologies of the human brain. In this tutorial will explore disorders
of consciousness in relation to three issues. First, we will give an
overview of what disorders of consciousness are, and how coma, the
vegetative state and the minimally conscious state differ from
each-other. Secondly, we will tackle the question of how to assess the
presence of residual cognition and consciousness despite the lack motor
or verbal responses. In this section we will focus on standard clinical
and experimental behavioural assessments, and neuroimaging approaches,
including electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI). A major focus of this section will be interpretation of
brain data and the relationship between brain activation and awareness:
What does brain data allow us to infer, about a patient’s mental life,
and under which (experimental) conditions? In the last section of the
tutorial we will explore the possible theoretical frameworks for
understanding the phenomenon of consciousness, and how this could lead
to a measure for quantifying its presence. This tutorial is aimed primarily at two audiences. For scientists, the overview of the topic together with the strong focus on methodology should provide an ideal first step into this field of research. For clinicians that are confronted with these patients, the tutorial will provide an overview of the how novel approaches can inform their decisions, and, in particular, what are the advantages and constraints of brain data. For philosophers will be a crash course into basic concepts on how to go from data to results to scientific interpretation. For all will be an exciting discussion about the limits of testing conscious processing without motor or verbal responses and the implications of this to neurosciences of consciousness. |
| TUTORIAL 3: “ Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Conscious Awareness ." Summary |
|
| Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is one of the few methods that
allow the direct manipulation of neural activity in human subjects in a
safe and reversible fashion. Unlike brain imaging methods, TMS allows us
to directly test for the causal role played by different brain regions
in different psychological processes. TMS can induce vivid changes in
human subjects’ conscious experience, by for instance inducing illusory
percepts when it is applied to the visual cortex, or by inducing
involuntary motor twitches when applied to the motor cortex. Compared to
brain imaging facilities, TMS is easy and cheap to set up (less than
US$25,000 for the initial setup of a basic laboratory). Therefore, more
and more researchers in cognitive neuroscience are employing TMS. This
is true also for consciousness research. This tutorial introduces the
basics of TMS, and requires minimal background knowledge in cognitive
neuroscience. We use examples from the consciousness literature, on
various topics such as visual awareness, experience of volition, and
sleep research, to illustrate different aspects of the technique,
drawing on work by ourselves as well as those by other laboratories. We
will also give critical analysis of selected individual studies, so
participants with substantial experience will also find the materials
stimulating. We hope that this tutorial will help attendants understand
this state-of-the-art method, and the potential future developments of
TMS studies on consciousness. Also, we hope this will help some
attendants decide how best to incorporate this technique into their
research.
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| TUTORIAL 4: “Self-Knowledge: Philosophy meets Cognitive Science. " Summary |
|
| Philosophers almost universally maintain that knowledge of our own
occurrent mental states (including not only our own perceptions, images,
and emotional feelings, but also our own current judgments, desires,
and decisions) is somehow privileged and authoritative. In contrast, a
wide range of evidence from across cognitive science suggests that while
our own experiences are globally broadcast (thereby becoming conscious)
and hence made available to the mindreading system (thus being easily
self-attributable), we can only know of our own propositional attitude
states via interpretation of sensorily-accessible data. Hence our
knowledge of our own propositional attitudes is little different in
epistemic status from our beliefs about of the attitudes of other
people. The first section of the tutorial will explain the contrasting approaches, and will develop the interpretive account, explaining how it is consistent with global broadcasting architectures and with current models of working memory. The second section will seek to explain the intuition of immediate access that underlies philosophical accounts, arguing that this results from a simplifying heuristic built into the structure of the mindreading faculty. The third section will examine evidence on meta-memory and meta-reasoning that bears on the debate, and will discuss evidence from schizophrenia, autism, and brain imaging that is alleged to show a dissociation between the mechanisms of self-knowledge and other-knowledge. Finally, the fourth section will look at evidence that people often make confabulatory claims about their own current attitudes, discussing how this seems to strongly support the self-interpretive account. |
------------------Afternoon Tutorials ------------------
| TUTORIAL 5: Cancelled |
| TUTORIAL 6: “Towards the neuroscientific definition and empirical investigation of Qualia. " Summary |
|
| Finding the neuronal correlates of consciousness (the NCC) has become a central issue in cognitive neuroscience. However, the definition of the key word, "qualia", remains elusive, and even researchers within the same field use “qualia” in many different ways, to the extent that we cannot answer simple questions such as "whether percepts of faces are qualia?" or “emotion of fear a quale?” Here, we offer a possible definition of “qualia” by considering what are irreducible units of perception from a neuroscientific point of view. We propose that whether a percept should be considered as a single quale or compound of qualia hinges on whether the percept requires top-down attention for binding or not. Our hypothesis predicts that “qualia” emerge from neuronal circuits that bind elements of percept via genetically instructed wiring or via rewiring through extensive learning. Chunked qulia can be bound flexibly via top-down attention, yet this is just a combination of qualia, which needs to be distinguished from genuine qualia. We believe the effort to make a clearer consensus of what qualia are could lead to a surge of neuroscientific investigation of consciousness, based on an analogy with researches on ‘elementary features’ following the proposal of Feature Integration Theory by Anne Treisman. We propose that our new hypothesis will facilitate empirical research into qualia by illuminating more focused issues directly relevant to the Hard Problem. |
| TUTORIAL 7: “Comparison of the Major Scientifically Oriented Theories of Consciousness." Summary |
|
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This tutorial will compare the following 5 theories of consciousness:
1. Higher order thought
2. Global Workspace
3. Neurocomputational
4. Integrated Information
5. Representational
These theories will be compared with regard to their accounts of 3 basic dimensions of consciousness: what distinguishes different contents of consciousness (for example, the experience of red vs the experience of green); what distinguishes a conscious perception from an unconscious perception (for example, what distinguishes a conscious perception of a fearful face from an unconscious perception of a fearful face); and what the difference is between a conscious creature and something unconscious or non-conscious (for example, a conscious human vs a non-conscious computer).
Background reading: No knowledge of the issue will be presupposed, but the following might be useful: “Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness,” The Cognitive Neurosciences IV, Michael Gazzaniga (ed.) MIT Press, 2009 |
| TUTORIAL 8: Cancelled |