Vincent Bergeron of the University of Ottawa will be giving the talk “Cognitive Homology as Cognitive Ontology” at noon in room 2203 of Dunton Tower.
http://carleton.ca/ics/colloquia-2/

Abstract of talk:

A primary goal of cognitive neuroscience is to identify stable relationships between brain structures and cognitive functions using, for example, functional neuroimaging techniques. Aside from the many technical, theoretical, and methodological issues that accompany this kind of research, an important empirical challenge has begun to receive widespread attention. There is mounting evidence that a great many brain structures are recruited by different tasks across different cognitive domains, which suggests that a given brain structure can participate in multiple different functions depending on the cognitive context. One possible reason for this apparent lack of one-to-one mapping between brain structures and cognitive functions is that our cognitive ontologies—i.e. our current descriptions of cognitive processes and their associated components—are either incorrect or too coarse. In this paper, I argue that a useful way to think about the components of human cognitive functions is to think of them as cognitive homologies. In contrast with the well known concept of structural homology in biology—defined as the same structure in different animals regardless of form and function, where sameness is defined by common phylogenetic origin—the proposed notion of cognitive homology focuses on the functional properties of homologous brain structures that tend to remain stable across extended evolutionary periods. I then argue, using recent findings from the cognitive neuroscience of social cognition, that the search for cognitive homologies can greatly contribute to the identification of stable structure-function relationships which, in turn, can be used for the construction of new cognitive ontologies.