THE MECHANISM OF THOUGHT: CONFABULATION

"THE MECHANISM OF THOUGHT: CONFABULATION"Dr. Robert Hecht-Nielsen
University of California at San DiegoWednesday, April 26, 20062:30 – 4:00 pmGerontology AuditoriumRefreshments will be served after the talkAbstract:The talk presents a fast parallel winner-take-all competition process called confabulation [1 – 3] as the fundamental mechanism of cognition—from vision and hearing to movement and reasoning. Confabulation theory models thinking as a process in which multiple confabulations interact and in which vast numbers of items of relevant knowledge (links between neuron clusters) apply in parallel. Such a multiconfabulation begins with billions of distinct but viable conclusions and ends with a single winning conclusion. The talk will discuss the engineering, mathematical, and neuroscientific aspects of (non-Bayesian) confabulation and suggest related next steps in the development of AI and thalamo-cortical neuroscience.1. Hecht-Nielsen, R., "Cogent Confabulation," Neural Networks 18:111–115, 2005.
2. Hecht-Nielsen, R., "Mechanization of Cognition," in Y. Bar-Cohen, ed., Biomimetics (pp. 57–128), Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
3. Hecht-Nielsen, R., "Replicator Neural Networks," Science 269:1860–1863, 1995.Bio:Dr. Robert Hecht-Nielsen is the Director of UC San Diego's Confabulation Neuroscience
Institute, an adjunct professor in UCSD's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
an IEEE Fellow, a recipient of the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Medal, a founder of UCSD's Graduate Program in Neurobiology, a member of UCSD's Institute for Neural Computation, author of the text NeuroComputing, and co-founder of HNC Software and the publicly traded Fair-Isaac Corporation.Host: Professor Bart Kosko, x06242, kosko@usc.edu

Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) -

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Rosine Sarafian