Author: Philipp Wicke

Lecturer: Andreas Kalckert
Fields: Cognitive neuroscience; Experimental psychology

Content

In this course I will provide an overview of the cognitive, perceptual, and neural mechanisms underpinning bodily self-awareness. Following Gallagher’s distinction of ownership vs. agency and using the rubber hand illusion as an experimental model, I will discuss how sensory and motor processes give rise the experience of the own body.
The course consists of two talks introducing the experimental and theoretical findings, followed by a hands-on session with the rubber hand illusion demonstrating some of the practical caveats when performing this experiment.

Literature

• Ehrsson HH. Multisensory processes in body ownership. In: Sathian K, Ramachandran VS, eds. Multisensory Perception: From Laboratory to Clinic. Academic Press: Elsevier; 2020:179-200.
• Graziano, M. S. A., & Botvinick, M. (2002). How the brain represents the body: insights from neurophysiology and psychology (pp. 136–157). In: Common Mechanisms in Perception and Action: Attention and Performance XIX. Eds. W. Prinz and B. Hommel. Oxford University Press, Oxford England
• Kalckert, A. (2017) I am moving my hand – Ownership, Agency, and the body. in “Sensation of movement”. Ed. Thor Gruenbaum and Mark Schram Christensen. Psychology Press: Current Issues in Consciousness Research
• Kalckert, A. & Ehrsson, H.H. (2012). Moving a rubber hand that feels like your own: a dissociation of ownership and agency. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Volume 6, Article 40

Lecturer

Dr. Andreas Kalckert received his Ph.D. from the Karolinska Institute, Sweden (Brain, Body, and Self Lab, Department of Neuroscience). After his Ph.D. he worked as a lecturer in psychology at the University of Reading Malaysia. He works now as a Senior lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy at the University of Skövde (Sweden). In his research, he specializes in the cognitive and perceptual processes of bodily self-awareness. His particular interests lies in the interaction of the Sense of Ownership and Sense of agency in body illusion paradigms such as the rubber hand illusion.

Affiliation: Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy, University of Skövde (Sweden)
Homepage: https://www.his.se/en/research/systems-biology/cognitive-neuroscience-and-philosophy/

Lecturer: Herbert Jaeger
Fields: Interdisciplinary methods basics

Content

This is a crash course on dynamical systems, held at the Interdisciplinary College already several times – there is a demand! The presentation is meant to be introductory, understandable for a general natural / neural / cognitive science audience. Here is the planned schedule:

Session 1: Part I: Introduction: so many ways to classify models of dynamical systems! – Part II: A zoo of finite-state models: finite-state automata with and without input, deterministic and non-deterministic, probabilistic), hidden Markov models and partially observable Markov decision processes.

Session 2: Finite-state models continued: Cellular automata, dynamical Bayesian networks. Part III: A zoo of continuous state models: iterated function systems, ordinary differential equations, stochastic differential equations, delay differential equations, partial differential equations, (neural) field equations. Part IV: What is a state? Takens’ theorem.

Session 3: Part V: State-free models of temporal systems. The engineering view on “signals”. Describing sequential data by grammars. Chomsky hierarchy. Exponential and power-law long-range interactions. Part VI: qualitative theory of dynamical systems. Attractors, structural stability.

Session 4: Part VI continued: bifurcations. Phase transitions. Topological dynamics. Discussion: attractors and symbols. Part VII: non-autonomous dynamical systems. Basic definitions. Nonautonomous attractor concepts.

Literature

• Literature: The slides from the 2021 presentation https://www.ai.rug.nl/minds/uploads/IntroDynSys_IK_2021.pdf contain numerous references to (mostly introductory) materials, sorted by topic.

Lecturer

Herbert Jaeger studied mathematics and psychology at the University of Freiburg and obtained his PhD in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at the University of Bielefeld. After a 5-year postdoctoral fellowship at the German National Research Center for Computer Science (Sankt Augustin, Germany) he headed the “Intelligent Dynamical Systems” group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems AIS (Sankt Augustin, Germany). From 2003 to 2019 he was Associate Professor for Computational Science at Jacobs University Bremen, and since 2019 he is Full Processor for Computing in Cognitive Materials at the University of Groningen. His current research revolves around formal theory-building for non-digital computing.

Affiliation: University of Groningen (NL)
Homepage: https://www.ai.rug.nl/minds/

Lecturer: Till Bockemühl / Ronald Sladky
Fields: Neuroscience

Content

The brain, the cause of – and solution to – all of life’s problems. According to our brains it is the most fascinating structure in the known universe. Consisting of about 86 billion neurons where each can form thousands of connections to other neurons it is also the most complex structure in the known universe. In this course we would like to give you a rough guide and introduction to the basic principles, fundamental theories, and methods of neuroscience.
We will demonstrate that neuroscience can be seen as a multi-modal, multi-level, multi-disciplinary research framework that aims at addressing the challenges of this megalomaniac scientific endeavor. We will see that different frameworks and methods can lead to conflicting empirical evidence, theoretical assumptions, and heated debates. However, we argue that this might be the only way to uncover the mysteries of our brain.
In this course we will cover a variety of scopes and perspectives. We will teach some of the fundamentals of neuroscience in human and non-human animals, but we will also explore some explanatory gaps between the different levels of inference.
On a phenomenal level we will investigate the functions of individual neurons and small networks. We will discuss if and how we can learn from (genetically modified) model animals about neural functions. To what degree is this relevant for understanding human brain function, such as learning and decision making? On the other hand, we will also investigate the state of the art in human brain mapping and cognitive neuroscience. Can findings from neuroimaging tell us anything at all about neurobiology – or are they just fancy illustrations that are better suited for children’s books?

Objectives:
– To understand the anatomy and function of neurons
– To understand the interaction of neurons in a functional network
– To understand central methods and theories used in neurobiology and human cognitive neuroscience
– To understand the scope of different methods and theoretical frameworks

Literature

• Cacioppo JT, Berntson GG, Lorig TS, Norris CJ, Rickett E, Nusbaum H. Just because you’re imaging the brain doesn’t mean you can stop using your head: a primer and set of first principles. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2003 Oct;85(4):650-61. [Link]
• Park HJ, Friston K. Structural and Functional Brain Networks: From Connections to Cognition. Science, 2013 Nov;6158(342):1238411 [Link]
• Bear MF, Connors BW, Paradiso MA. Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain. Wolters Kluwer Health. 2015.

Lecturer

Till Bockemühl studied biology and philosophy at Bielefeld University. He did his diploma thesis as well as his doctoral thesis with Volker Dürr in the lab of Holk Cruse at Bielefeld University. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Ansgar Büschges at the University of Cologne. His main research interests comprise the motor control of locomotion, neuroethology, and computational neurobiology. To investigate these topics, he uses the fruit fly Drosophila and the ever-expanding toolkit of methodological opportunities this model organism has to offer.

Affiliation: University of Cologne
Homepage: http://www.zoologie.uni-koeln.de/bueschges-staff-tillbockemuehl.html

Ronald Sladky. My research focuses on the amygdala and emotion processing in the human brain. In addition, I am always working on new neuroimaging, data processing, and modeling methods. One of these new methods is real-time functional MRI, where people can learn to regulate their own brain states while they are inside the MRI scanner. This method is not only a promising therapeutic tool, it will also allow for completely new ways of discovering how our brains work.

Affiliation: University of Vienna
Homepage: http://sweetneuron.at

Lecturer: Benjamin Paaßen
Fields: Machine Learning

Content

Machine learning is concerned with automatically learning models (patterns, regularities, correlations) from known data which generalize to new data. To do so, it combines concepts from mathematics (esp. statistics, probability theory, linear algebra, and optimization), artificial intelligence, and computer science. This course will provide an introduction to machine learning for the un-initiated. Students will need to suffer through some math, but hopefully my enthusiasm will convey the beauty behind it 🙂 And my focus is on lots of examples and pictures.

In more detail, the course will have four sessions with the following topics:

1. Basic Concepts: Functions, learning algorithms, optimization, linear regression (as an example of a learning algorithm), regularization, probability theory, machine learning theory, how to design a ML experiment, how to read an ML paper
2. Classic machine learning tasks and methods to solve them: The distance perspective on ML, Regression, Classification, Dimensionality Reduction, Clustering
3. Artificial neural networks and deep learning: Neural network modules, recipes for neural networks, adversarial attacks
4. Reinforcement learning and ethics

Each session is accompanied by a (voluntary) programming exercise in Python. Exercise sheets (and slides) can be found here: https://bpaassen.gitlab.io/Teaching.html

Literature

Literature is optional and more regarded as ‘further/complementary reading’:

• Barber, D. (2012). Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK. http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/d.barber/brml/
• Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y., and Courville, A. (2016). Deep Learning. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA, USA. https://www.deeplearningbook.org/
• Paaßen, B., Artelt, A., Hammer, B. (2019). Lecture Notes on Applied Optimization. Bielefeld University. https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/record/2935200
• Shalev-Shwartz, S., and Ben-David, S. (2014). Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms. Cambride University Press. Cambridge, UK. https://www.cs.huji.ac.il/w~shais/UnderstandingMachineLearning/

Lecturer

Benjamin Paaßen received their doctoral degree in intelligent systems in 2019 from Bielefeld University on the topic of ‘Metric Learning for Structured Data’. Afterwards, they received a DFG research fellowship for a stay at The University of Sydney in Australia and Humboldt-University of Berlin. Since 2021, they are deputy head of the educational technology lab at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Their research foci are machine learning on structured data and artificial intelligence for education.

Affiliation: German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Homepage: https://bpaassen.gitlab.io/