Average is optimal: An inverted-U relationship between trial-to-trial brain activity and behavioral performance

It is well known that even under identical task conditions, there is a tremendous amount of trial-to-trial variability in both brain activity and behavioral output. Thus far the vast majority of event-related potential (ERP) studies investigating the relationship between trial-to-trial fluctuations in brain activity and behavioral performance have only tested a monotonic relationship between them. However, it was recently found that across-trial variability can correlate with behavioral performance independent of trial-averaged activity. This finding predicts a U- or inverted-U- shaped relationship between trial-to-trial brain activity and behavioral output, depending on whether larger brain variability is associated with better or worse behavior, respectively. Using a visual stimulus detection task, we provide evidence from human electrocorticography (ECoG) for an inverted-U brain-behavior relationship: When the raw fluctuation in broadband ECoG activity is closer to the across-trial mean, hit rate is higher and reaction times faster. Importantly, we show that this relationship is present not only in the post-stimulus task-evoked brain activity, but also in the pre-stimulus spontaneous brain activity, suggesting anticipatory brain dynamics. Our findings are consistent with the presence of stochastic noise in the brain. They further support attractor network theories, which postulate that the brain settles into a more confined state space under task performance, and proximity to the targeted trajectory is associated with better performance

Internal Representation of Task Rules by Recurrent Dynamics: The Importance of the Diversity of Neural Responses

Neural activity of behaving animals, especially in the prefrontal cortex, is highly heterogeneous, with selective responses to diverse aspects of the executed task. We propose a general model of recurrent neural networks that perform complex rule-based tasks, and we show that the diversity of neuronal responses plays a fundamental role when the behavioral responses are context-dependent. Specifically, we found that when the inner mental states encoding the task rules are represented by stable patterns of neural activity (attractors of the neural dynamics), the neurons must be selective for combinations of sensory stimuli and inner mental states. Such mixed selectivity is easily obtained by neurons that connect with random synaptic strengths both to the recurrent network and to neurons encoding sensory inputs. The number of randomly connected neurons needed to solve a task is on average only three times as large as the number of neurons needed in a network designed ad hoc. Moreover, the number of needed neurons grows only linearly with the number of task-relevant events and mental states, provided that each neuron responds to a large proportion of events (dense/distributed coding). A biologically realistic implementation of the model captures several aspects of the activity recorded from monkeys performing context-dependent tasks. Our findings explain the importance of the diversity of neural responses and provide us with simple and general principles for designing attractor neural networks that perform complex computation

Neuromorphic Electronic Circuits for Building Autonomous Cognitive Systems

Chicca E, Stefanini F, Bartolozzi C, Indiveri G. Neuromorphic Electronic Circuits for Building Autonomous Cognitive Systems. In: Proceedings of the IEEE. Proceedings of the IEEE. Vol 102. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE; 2014: 1367-1388.Several analog and digital brain-inspired electronic systems have been recently proposed as dedicated solutions for fast simulations of spiking neural networks. While these architectures are useful for exploring the computational properties of large-scale models of the nervous system, the challenge of building low-power compact physical artifacts that can behave intelligently in the real world and exhibit cognitive abilities still remains open. In this paper, we propose a set of neuromorphic engineering solutions to address this challenge. In particular, we review neuromorphic circuits for emulating neural and synaptic dynamics in real time and discuss the role of biophysically realistic temporal dynamics in hardware neural processing architectures; we review the challenges of realizing spike-based plasticity mechanisms in real physical systems and present examples of analog electronic circuits that implement them; we describe the computational properties of recurrent neural networks and show how neuromorphic winner-take-all circuits can implement working-memory and decision-making mechanisms. We validate the neuromorphic approach proposed with experimental results obtained from our own circuits and systems, and argue how the circuits and networks presented in this work represent a useful set of components for efficiently and elegantly implementing neuromorphic cognition

Space is the machine: a configurational theory of architecture

Since The social logic of space was published in 1984, Bill Hillier and his colleagues at University College London have been conducting research on how space features in the form and functioning of buildings and cities. A key outcome is the concept of ‘spatial configuration’ — meaning relations which take account of other relations in a complex. New techniques have been developed and applied to a wide range of architectural and urban problems. The aim of this book is to assemble some of this work and show how it leads the way to a new type of theory of architecture: an ‘analytic’ theory in which understanding and design advance together. The success of configurational ideas in bringing to light the spatial logic of buildings and cities suggests that it might be possible to extend these ideas to other areas of the human sciences where problems of configuration and pattern are critical

Exploring the Lived-Experience of business model innovation

Due to increasingly complex and uncertain environments, businesses must deal with multiple competing and often opposing models, what we may call 'ontological relativity'. To deal with this, the practice of innovation management requires a new type of practical-epistemology. The best insight into these new types of knowledge is an exploration of lived experience of innovation management practitioners. This research then explores the phenomena involved in the practice of business model innovation in the context of two innovation projects. To achieve these goals, a phenomenological method is used to uncover fundamental aspects of the innovation process. The outcome of the inquiry is a set a set of phenomena that hope to contribute to the discourse around this emerging field of management knowledge

A Bricolage of Critical Hermeneutics, Abductive Reasoning, and Action Research for Advancing Humanistic Values through Organization Development Practice

This is an emergent and auto-ethnographic study to find ways for the practice of organization development (OD) to recover and sustain humanism in the workplace. It begins with a literature review hermeneutically exploring the history and relevance of three modes of inquiry—hermeneutics, abductive reasoning, and action research—paratactically, which is to say, separately without overlap or reference to each other—to future OD practice. These three modes were selected from an extended literature search for non-reductive modes of inquiry that could address the range of human interests and workplace disease as I understand them. I combined my strong background reading on hermeneutics with the abductive reasoning of C. S. Peirce as two of the modes for review and also reflexively as part of my own methodology. The third mode, action research, is borrowed from the work of Kurt Lewin and his tradition in OD, known for its humanistic and democratic aims. Also included in the literature review is a report on the some of the more salient challenges and opportunities currently confronting the practice of organization development (OD) to provide a context for practical expression of my emerging discoveries. Following the literature review, I hermeneutically surfaced submerged, tacit (hidden-from-consciousness) generative connections from the confluence (flowing together) of the three modes, as they abductively emerged from within my expanding hermeneutic experience (known as a horizon) with the literature review. I then interpret the tacit relevance of that confluence through my life experience, for illuminating those OD challenges and opportunities. Finally this study integrates a sequence of critical hermeneutic and abductive processes in a participatory action research (PAR) pathway leading to plateaus of discovery and renewal through facilitation by humanistically oriented OD praxis. I conclude with five abduced interventions hypothetically drawn from personal case studies. My audience are OD practitioners inclined to develop wholistic humanism in the workplace through facilitative immersion with small groups and micro-cultures. Here they may find enlarged conceptual frames to reconceptualize OD, engage clients in transformative dialogue, and create actionable knowledge in their practice

Towards an Aesthetic Epistemology: Transforming Thinking through Cybernetic Epistemology and Anthroposophy

The complexity, subtlety, interlinking, and scale of many problems faced individually and collectively in today's rapidly changing world requires an epistemology--a way of thinking about our knowing--capable of facilitating new kinds of responses that avoid recapitulation of old ways of thinking and living. Epistemology, which implicitly provides the basis for engagement with the world via the fundamental act of distinction, must therefore be included as a central facet of any practical attempts at self/world transformation. We need to change how we think, not just what we think. The new epistemology needs to be of a higher order than the source of the problems we face. This theoretical, transdisciplinary dissertation argues that such a new epistemology needs to be recursive and process-oriented. This means that the thoughts about thinking that it produces must explicitly follow the patterns of thinking by which those thoughts are generated. The new epistemology is therefore also phenomenological, requiring the development of a reflexivity in thinking that recursively links across two levels of order--between content and process. The result is an epistemology that is of (and for) the whole human being. It is an enacted (will-imbued) and aesthetic (feeling-permeated) epistemology (thinking-penetrated) that is sensitive to and integrative of material, soul, and spiritual aspects of ourselves and our world. I call this kind of epistemology aesthetic, because its primary characteristic is found in the phenomenological, mutually fructifying and transformative marriage between the capacity for thinking and the capacity for feeling. Its foundations are brought forward through the confluence of multiple domains: cybernetic epistemology, the esoteric epistemology of anthroposophy (the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner), and the philosophy of the implicit as developed by Eugene Gendlin. The practice of aesthetic epistemology opens new phenomenal domains of experience, shedding light on relations between ontology and epistemology, mind and body, logic and thinking, as well as on the formation (and transformation) of identity, the immanence of thinking in world-processes, the existence of different types of logic, and the nature of beings, of objects, and most importantly of thinking itself and its relationship to spirit

Becoming One with the Image

The primary concern of Becoming One with the Screen is the question of how experience is integrated into the general unfolding of actuality as an imagistic process. It deals with the problem though the experience of spectatorship in cinema. We present the experience of participating in a film screening as a relational and associative process in order to undo the dualistic spectator/screen relationship reflective of the subject/object relation. And radiating outwards from this problem, memory looms large as explicatory of the integrative process. As such, we examine the concept‐cluster of words surrounding memory not only to (re)contextualize the discourse on memory but to tie it to the historical tradition and deal with the complementary concepts of Faciality and The Fold from the point of view of imagistic thought and memory. Central to the discussion will be the process of adumbration by which the Many become One as the perpetuum mobile of the eventual continuity of change in actuality as being. We shall advance that the façade of becoming actual of the world as a moving imagistic front as the perception of the integrated affirmation of being one with the image world. Key Words: Memory, immanence, fold, faciality, spectatorshi

Metaphor, Imagery, and Culture. Spatialized Ontologies, Mental Tools, and Multimedia in the Making.

The thesis deals with metaphor and imagery in cultural thought-models, the aim being an integrative framework for a rapprochement between cognitive science, cultural anthropology , and linguistics. The work couches previous ethnographic data in the theoretical apparatus of cognitive linguistics (as pioneered by G. Lakoff and R. Langacker), which is horizontally extended to include non-linguistic phenomena and vertically extended to include high-level mental tools. As groundwork for understanding cultural cognition in Part One I undertake a reappraisal of the theory of conceptual metaphor from a genuinely anthropological perspective: I elaborate (1) the multiplicity of metaphor's socio-cognitive functions, its embedding in complex 'polytropes', and its interplay with higher-level cultural schemas; (2)I propose a balanced view between universality and cultural variation in metaphor; and (3) I advocate an intensified focus on cultural body knowledge as the basis of metaphor. Part Two sets as its goal to contour the scope of cultural imagery by extending the theory of dynamic image schemas, as laid out by Langacker, beyond language itself: (4) I analyze essentialist and processual ontologies as being defined through basic imagery types and dynamic switches between ontologies through image schema transformations. (5) Next, I argue for the necessity of cognitive multimedia analysis and offer a model based on the presupposition that various aspects of language, non-linguistic symbolism, action schemas, and body feelings operate in a continuous mental substrate, namely image schemas. (6) Finally, taking the lead from Lakoff's 'spatialization of form' hypothesis, I challenge the broader cognitive sciences with a multi-level theory of spatialized ('geometric') imagery that spans from semantics to general-purpose mental 'tools'. Its upshot is a relativization of symbolic or propositional approaches to thought as well as faculty psychology