Aug 01 2007
Arrival CogSci 2007
Well we successfully arrived last night at the Gaylord Opryland convention center & hotel for the 29th annual Cognitive Science conference. Actually the Gaylord center would be right at home in Texas, it is HUGE (apparently there is a Gaylord in Grapevine, but I haven’t been there, wonder if it is the same thing). It seems like the hotel can’t decide whether it wants to be a theme park or maybe just a mall. At the risk of sounding a bit snobbish, the overall effect is a bit tacky, but the facilities for the conference appear to be more than adequate.
A few pictures from our first day…
Day 1
Went to David Noelle’s tutorial on Computational Cognitive Neuroscience this morning. Mainly a tutorial on PDP++/Leabra, a neural simulation software suite. I was not familiar with the software as I had only heard of it and not used it before. I was impressed. It appears to support many of the same properties of the K-models; including attractor dynamics, like periodic, point and maybe even chaotic dynamics, and using layers for excitatory-excitatory, excitatory-inhibitory, inhibitory-excitatory, inhibitory-inhibitory connectivity, similar to KII and KIII setup and dynamics. It even appears they think of units in terms of representing a homologous (small) population in order to address rate coding model problems, again similar with if not the same as K models. Also use mainly Hebbian correlational learning, as well as an error correction which is probably similar to the weight normalizations done in many K models. However, the emphasis is still definitely on cognitive models that employ point attractor dynamics to form representations, an important difference from Freeman’s K-sets.