Connectionists: CCNC 2006: Call for Fellowship Applicants

[Randall C. O'Reilly]

      ~ CCNC2006 --- CALL FOR FELLOWSHIP APPLICANTS ~ 

The CCNC organizing committee is pleased to announce the availability of a 
limited number of $500 fellowship awards to early-career computational 
cognitive neuroscience researchers and potential researchers. Eligible 
candidates should be undergraduates, graduate students, or post-docs. It is 
anticipated that approximately five (5) stipends will be awarded. 

Criteria to be used in selection will include (in approximate order of 
weighting):

* Financial need: e.g., student status, specific hardship, etc.

* Membership in a group underrepresented in science: e.g., African-American, 
  Hispanic, Native American ancestry; female gender 

* Distance to be traveled: Transoceanic vs. North America 

* Participating author: e.g., are you a sole presenter, first author, 
  auxiliary author on a poster? 

Interested applicants should send an email to the conference administrator no 
later than Friday September 29, 2006:

Thomas E. Hazy, MD
thazy at colorado.edu

Your email should include your career status and address all of the selection
criteria listed above. Please also include the name and contact info of a
faculty reference who is familiar with your career status, academic work
and/or research interests and can corroborate your application if asked.

An overview of CCNC2006 is provided below.

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2ND ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTATIONAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
                    www.ccnconference.org

To be held in conjunction with the 2006 PSYCHONOMIC SOCIETY CONFERENCE,
November 16-19, 2006 at the Hilton Americas hotel in Houston, TX.

CONFERENCE DATES: Wed-Thu November 15 & 16, 2006

The inaugural CCNC 2005 meeting held prior to Society for Neuroscience (SfN)
in Washington DC was a great success with approximately 250 attendees 60
presented posters and strongly positive reviews. In future years it will
continue to be held on a rotating basis with other meetings such
as (tentative list): Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) Organization for
Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) Cognitive Science Society (CogSci) Neural
Information Processing Systems (NIPS) and Computational and Systems
Neuroscience (COSYNE).
____________________________________________________________________________

                          ~PROGRAM~
_________________________________________________________________________
* 2006 Keynote Speakers (confirmed):
       Mike Kahana, University of Pennsylvania
       Mark Seidenberg, University of Wisconsin Madison
___________________________________________________________________________
* 3 Symposia (2 hours each):

1) Face/Object Recognition: Are Faces Special, or Just a Special Case?
   Computational models of face and object processing

Speakers:
        Gary Cottrell, UCSD (Moderator)
        Kalanit Grill-Spector, Stanford
        Alice O'Toole, UT Dallas
        Maximilian Riesenhuber, Georgetown

Description: 
What can computational models tell us about human visual object processing? We
have excellent models that explain how we may recognize objects at multiple
scales and orientations, while other models explain why faces may or may not
be "special," or simply a special case. The goal of this symposium is to
summarize what we understand with some degree of confidence, what is still not
understood, and to what degree what we understand meshes with data on human
and animal visual processing, including behavioral, fMRI, neurophysiological,
and neuropsychological data.

2) Semantics: Development and Brain Organization of Conceptual Knowledge:
   Computational and Experimental Investigations.

Speakers:
        Jay McClelland, Stanford University (Moderator)
        Linda Smith, Indiana University
        Tim Rogers, University of Wisconsin
        Alex Martin, National Institute of Mental Health

Description: 
The symposium is predicated on the assumption that there are links between
conceptual structure, experience, conceptual development, and brain
organization of conceptual knowledge. Jay McClelland will begin with
a computational perspective on conceptual development, followed by Linda Smith
with an empirical perspective. We would then switch to the subject of
brain organization of conceptual knowledge, beginning with a computational
perspective by Tim Rogers followed by an empirical perspective from Alex
Martin.

3) Emergent Cognitive Control: Computational and Empirical Investigations

Speakers:
        Mike Mozer, University of Colorado (Moderator)
        Stephen Monsell, University of Exeter
        Gordon Logan, Vanderbilt
        Matt Bottvinick, University of Pennsylvania
        Sue Becker, McMaster

Description: 
Cognitive control is required whenever an individual performs novel
activities, either because the task is novel or because the stimuli,
responses, or task environment is unfamiliar. Aspects of cognitive control
include: the deployment of visual attention, the selection of responses, and
the use of working memory to subserve ongoing processing.  The cognitive
architecture is extremely flexible. The role of cognitive control is to
reconfigure this general-purpose architecture to perform a specific
task. Cognitive control is typically conceived of in terms of an active
process in frontal cortex which guides and routes processing in posterior
systems. Even if the process is implemented in neural hardware, it still has
the flavor of a homunculus---an intelligent overseer that inhibits or
otherwise biases processing in less intelligent, subservient systems. In this
symposium, we wish to explore alternative perspectives on cognitive control,
including perspectives that treat control as an emergent property of a complex
cognitive architecture, and perspectives in which control is not an explicit
active process, but rather a consequence of the sequential dynamics of
experience.
__________________________________________________________________________

* 12 short contributed talks featuring selected posters

* Poster sessions
___________________________________________________________________________

2006 Planning Committee:

Suzanna Becker, McMaster University
Jonathan Cohen, Princeton University
Yuko Munakata, University of Colorado, Boulder
David Noelle, Vanderbilt University
Randall O'Reilly, University of Colorado, Boulder
Maximilian Riesenhuber, Georgetown University Medical Center

Executive Organizer: Thomas Hazy, University of Colorado, Boulder

For more information and to sign up for the mailing list visit:
                     www.ccnconference.org