TITLE: A Review of Cell Assemblies
SPEAKER: Dr. Dan Diaper (DDD SYSTEMS)

ABSTRACT:

Writing a major journal review paper on Cell Assemblies (CAs) presents the authors (Huyck, Diaper & Passmore) with interdisciplinary intellectual challenges of a high order of difficulty.  For example, wishing to claim that CAs exist as organisations of neurons throughout the brain requires establishing the status of such existence; an issue of metaphysics.  At another extreme, experimental cognitive psychology has failed to produce a general architecture for the mind as an information processing device and thus does not provide an adequate model for physiological data to be assigned to psychological function.  Methodologically, both within and across disciplines, there are not only the problems of integrating divers data collected for conflicting purposes, but that the dangers of employing converging evidence arguments are considerable.  Furthermore, there is a tension in AI, psychology and physiology between scientific and applied research which makes the success of artificial neural net implementations difficult to assess; indeed, even the criteria of success are far from established.  These and similar issues will be introduced in the seminar and the audience then be encouraged to assist the authors, who are still in the process of preparing the first full draft of their paper.