nips97 workshop: models of episodic memory and hippocampus

[Sue Becker]

		    NIPS*97 workshop announcement

	       COMPUTATIONAL MODELS OF EPISODIC MEMORY
		       AND HIPPOCAMPAL FUNCTION


The aim of this one-day workshop is to bring together computational
modellers (not just of the neural network type) and experimentalists
to share information on data and models. This will allow us to explore
how these models can be better informed by experimental data, and how
they may be used to guide experimental questions.

Understanding the mechanisms underlying episodic memory, and the
long-term storage of temporally ordered experience in general, remains
a fascinating problem for both cogntive psychology and
neuroscience. Interestingly, episodic memory has long been thought to
involve the hippocampus, a structure in which recent experimental and
modelling advances have provided insight at both the physiological and
behavioral levels.  The aim of this workshop is to bring together
modellers and experimenters from a wide range of disciplines to define
the key aspects of human behaviour (and possibly physiology and
anatomy) that a model of epsisodic memory should account for, and to
discuss the computational mechanisms that might support it.

Modellers will span a wide range of approaches, but will all make
contact in some way with human memory data. One or more of the
experimenters will start the workshop off by addressing the data
regarding episodic memory and hippocampal function from psychology,
neuropsychology, functional imaging and animal physiology. The format
of the rest of the workshop will be a mixture of lectures and
discussions on the merits of various modelling approaches - of which
neural networks are just one example. Each speaker will have
approximately 25 minutes, including about 7-10 minutes for discussion.

Tentative speaker list:

 Paul Fletcher 
 Mike Hasselmo
 Jay McClelland
 Janet Wiles   
 Chip Levy      
 Andy Yonelinas 
 Alan Pickering 
 Jaap Murre     
 Mike Kahana    
 Bill Skaggs    
 Neil Burgess   
 Randy O'Reilly 
 Sue Becker     

Date and location: 
Friday December 5, in Breckenridge, Colorado, at the site of the NIPS*97
workshops following the main conference in Denver (see
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Web/Groups/NIPS for details)

Call for submissions:
We may have time for a small number of contributed talks. Interested
participants are asked to submit by email a title, abstract and
summary of relevant publications to each of the organizers.

Organizers:
Sue Becker (becker at mcmaster.ca)
Neil Burgess (n.burgess at ucl.ac.uk)
Randy O'Reilly (oreilly at flies.mit.edu)

Web page:
http://claret.psychology.mcmaster.ca/becker/nips97wshop
Abstracts will be added here soon. Summaries of talks will be
published here after the workshop.