Big brains conference

[David Field]

There remains a limited number of openings for people wishing to attend
this year's Cornell Symposium. A list of speakers and abstracts of talks
can be found on our World Wide Web page.
The URL is
        http://comp9.psych.cornell.edu/Psychology/big-brains.html
or      http://redwood.psych.cornell.edu/big-brains.html


Cornell University
Summer Symposium 1995:  Big Brains
June 23-26

Co-organizers:  Barbara Finlay and David Field

        Many forces  encourage and constrain the development of large
brains, and large brains assemble themselves into new architectures that
reflect these forces.   Big brains are presumably selected for better and
more efficient  perception, cognition and behavior:  how is selection for
behavior translated into structure?  Organismal and developmental
constraints on selection for increased brain size are numerous:  energetic
requirements of the developing fetus, linkage of early developmental
events, body conformation factors like pelvis size, social structure of the
species and the mature brain's energetic requirements are all examples of
forces which influence brain size and conformation.   We now know a number
of essential facts about how distribution of connectivity, modularity and
the nature of functional specialization change as brains get large.
Current work on computational architecture of neural nets has revealed
strategies that work optimally for either small or large assemblies of
units, and principles of organization that emerge only in larger
assemblies.  Using "big brains" as a focal point, this conference draws
together researchers who work at all these levels of analysis to understand
more of how our large brain has come to be.