Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: Sensorimotor Plasticity and Cognitive Flexibility: A Neuoremergentist Approach

Abstract

Neuroemergentism, (NM) is a novel framework which has sought to consider language development as involving the organization and reorganization of cognition and its underlying neural substrate. Work to support this framework comes from studies of language and cognitive development. In this talk, I will focus on two separate levels, the sensorimotor plasticity needed to adjust to new input and the cognitive flexibility needed to select between these competing sources of information. This talk will discuss both these levels with regard to the neurocognitive adaptations seen in bilinguals. This will include structural brain differences in monolinguals and bilinguals that vary in the age of second language acquisition. In the second part, of the talk work that has focused on the cognitive flexibility will be presented. This will focus on the adaptations of the basal ganglia and frontostriatal tracts as a gating mechanism crucial for selecting the correct motor response. This includes newer work which links genes associated with dopamine to cognitive and language flexibility in bilinguals. The ways in which sensorimotor plasticity and cognitive flexibility represent accurate but incomplete conceptualizations of the competitive processes involved in language and cognitive processing will be discussed. The talk will conclude with potential future directions using an NM framework.

About the speaker

Arturo E. HERNANDEZ is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Houston. His major research interest is in the neural underpinnings of bilingual language processing and second language acquisition in children and adults. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. HERNANDEZ has been a member of the NIH, Language and Communication Study Section and a National Academies Panel on English Language Learners and currently serves as the Editor-In-Chief of Journal of Neurolinguistics. In 2002, he was awarded an NSF postdoctoral fellowship to spend a year as a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute for Mind and Brain in Leipzig, Germany. In 2014, he was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award to spend a year visiting Prof. Dr. Christian FIEBACH at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. More recently, his work has led to a new theoretical framework called Neurocomputational Emergentism which seeks to understand how the brain and cognition dynamically reorganize themselves over time to produce higher-level processes such as language. HERNANDEZ has also been influenced by having learned four languages at various points during his life. He was a visiting fellow at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in San Sebastian, Spain which was sponsored by a Fulbright scholar award. During this time he expanded his line of research on bilingualism, cognitive flexibility and aging.