FriSem

Steve Piantadosi, Assistant Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley

Title: Towards a formal foundation for cognitive science

I will present some new work, in collaboration with Randy Gallistel, that seeks to formalize inferences in cognitive science. We develop a mathematical approach to formally proving that certain neural structures exist based on patterns observed in an organism’s behavior. To illustrate, we provide simple conditions under which an ant’s ability to determine how far it is from its nest would logically imply the existence of neural structures that are isomorphic to the natural numbers, and we relate this analysis to the experimental literature. Using prior tools from dynamical systems and computer science, we generalize the approach to yield a recipe for using behavior to discover the minimal cognitive system that is necessarily represented neurally. This approach provides an objective way to determine what cognitive theory of a physical system is best, addressing a fundamental challenge in neuroscientific inference.