Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: Revealing Diverse Perceptual and Cognitive Representations in the Human Brain

Abstract

Our daily experiences are shaped by the processing of sensory signals, leading to a variety of cognitive functions in the brain. Understanding the representations and functional structures underlying these functions is a key focus in functional neuroimaging studies. This comprehensive understanding is also vital for appreciating neuronal diversity and has significant implications for clinical applications. However, the integration and co-representation of these diverse functions remain underexplored. Toward this goal, we have built quantitative voxel-wise encoding and decoding models of brain activity evoked by diverse perceptual and cognitive experiences. Such studies have revealed latent representational spaces of cognitive functions and their fine-scale cortical mapping. In my talk, I will present some of our key findings, including semantic representations during natural audiovisual experiences, multidimensional mappings of diverse emotions, and a comprehensive brain-wide mapping of diverse cognitive functions.

About the speaker

Shinji NISHIMOTO received his Ph.D. in neurophysiology from Osaka University. He worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate Specialist at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley. After working at the Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), as a Senior Researcher (Principal Investigator), he became a Professor at the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University. He is also affiliated as a Guest Professor with the Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University, and as a Research Manager at CiNet, NICT. His main research interest is the quantitative understanding of neural computation and representations.