Yanchao Bi
Session: H. Normal development/cognition I
Will talk about: The functional and neural architecture of object concepts
Yanchao Bi is a professor in the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Beijing Normal University. She received her PhD from the Department of Psychology, Harvard University in 2006. Her current work focuses on the studying of functional and neural architecture associated with semantic memory and language. Her lab uses cognitive, neuropsychological and neuroimaging approaches to jointly study the ways in which the brain represents and accesses knowledge about the meaning of words, objects and sounds. Her research is mainly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China and Ministry of Science and Technology.
In our long term (semantic) memory stores vast amount of knowledge, a basic element of which is the knowledge about various types of objects, such as their shape, color, and function. This system serves as a foundation for many cognitive processes including language, object recognition and use, and problem solving. Where and how in the brain is object knowledge represented? In my talk I will present work in my lab that tackles two issues concerning object knowledge representation: 1) The “grounding” problem: the relationship between object knowledge and sensory experience; 2) The “binding” problem: how different object conceptual processes are anatomically and functional connected together. I will bring together evidence from structural and functional imaging data of healthy individuals and various special populations (congenital blind and patients with brain damage), on the basis of which a conjecture about how knowledge “grounding” interacts with the “binding” mechanisms for object conceptual representation is postulated.
