Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: Perception, Language, and Knowledge Representation in the Human Brain

Abstract

Human brain stores tremendous amount of knowledge about this world, which is the foundation of object recognition, language, thought, and reasoning. What’s the neural codes of semantic knowledge representation? Is the knowledge “roses are red” simply the memory trace of perceiving the color of roses, stored in the brain circuits within color-sensitive neural systems? What about knowledge that is not directly perceived by senses, such as “freedom” or “rationality”? I will present a set of studies from my lab that addresses this issue, including object color (and other visual) knowledge in several populations (congenitally blind humans, color blind humans, and typically developed macaques), and semantic neural representation in individuals with early language experience deprivation. The findings point to the existence of two different types of knowledge coding in different regions of the human brain – one conservative, based on sensory experiences, and one based on language-derived machinery that support fully nonsensory information. The relationship between these two types of knowledge coding will be discussed.

About the speaker

Yanchao BI is a Changjiang Professor and a Boya Professor. She received her PhD from the Department of Psychology at Harvard University in 2006. She serves as a senior editor for the journals eLife and Neurobiology of Language. She has received numerous awards, scholarships, and recognitions, including the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, the Sackler Scholar in Psychophysiology, a Fulbright Scholarship, and recognition as a "Rising Star" in Observer by the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Her research focuses on the functional and neural architecture underlying knowledge representation, semantic memory, and language.