CHBH Seminar Series: Prof. Sen Cheng

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Sen Cheng from Ruhr-University Bochum will be delivering a seminar on Thursday 12th March. 

Title: The temporal organization of episodic memory

Abstract:
The nature, organization and neural representation of episodic memory remains controversial. I suggest that the temporal organization of episodic memory is key to understanding it. Physics dictates that events unfold sequentially and continuously in time. However, our experience of events is discontinuous. It appears that we group sequences of related events into larger units, which we call episodes. I propose that it is experiences of such episodes that are stored and reconstructed from episodic memory. The hippocampus plays a critical role in these processes, but its specific function remains unclear. I hypothesize that the hippocampus stores and generates sequences of neural activity, which form the backbone of episodic memories. In this talk, I will discuss a range of evidence that support these views originating from behavioural experiments, neural recordings, computational modelling and philosophical analysis.

Biography:

Sen Cheng studied theoretical physics and switched to neuroscience as a postdoc. Since 2010, he has been a Professor of Computational Neuroscience at Ruhr University Bochum. In 2016, he was appointed to the Institute for Neural Computation. He studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms of episodic memory using a variety of computational methods such as biological neural networks, cognitive modeling, and machine learning. His research is interdisciplinary and combines philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific and computational aspects. He founded and currently heads the DFG-funded research unit FOR 2812 "Constructing scenarios of the past: A new framework in episodic memory".

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CHBH Seminars are free to attend and are open to all, both within and outside the University. Booking is not required.

If you have any questions, please contact Dr Maria Wimber (m.wimber@bham.ac.uk) or chbh@contacts.bham.ac.uk