Modeling, Brains, and Computers (lectures 1 and 2)

Randy O’Reilly explaining how neurons detect things, and introducing Pandemonium

Randy O’Reilly explaining Pandemonium

Randy O’Reilly on neurons are in the dark (7 min)

The 2015 state of the art for robots manipulating things in a somewhat real-world environment. The DRC Finals , Video

If you forgot what logarithms are; this is purely for interpreting one of the graphs in lecture.

Optional

  • “early AI researchers made a big mistake: they thought intelligence was stuff they found hard to do” - Rodney Brooks video

  • When robots are better than humans. Tesla car factory

  • The epic struggle to climb stairs

  • Advanced conventional computer architecture. Much more complicated than the simple separation of computation and memory, with one-at-a-time execution instruction that I showed in lecture, but still they’re largely separate.

  • O’Reilly, R. C., Munakata, Y., Frank, M. J., Hazy, T. E., et al. (2012). Computational Cognitive Neuroscience. Free: http://ccnbook.colorado.edu

Optional on AI

  • The first of a series of vids on machine learning (the neural nets being used widely in industry, for everything from detecting cancer in x-rays to matching prospective romantic partners and personalizing marketing.

Optional readings for the tutorial – Simulating Lil’ Brains

Maps in your brain (lectures 3 and 4)

On Canvas:Reading List, “Carlson, 2010 excerpts” (Neil Carlson, not Tom Carlson!), Physiology of Behavior 10th edition:

If it doesn’t work, just read the “Coordinate transformations” part of the PDF version and skim the rest of it.

Neglect and the parietal lobe:

The fact that some patients suffering from unilateral neglect also experience left representational neglect, affecting their imagery and their memory performance, was first reported by Bisiach & Luzzatti (1978), who asked two neglect patients to imagine being in the Piazza Del Duomo, a well known square in Milan, the patients’ native city, and to describe the buildings and other features around the square. (One of the patients was also questioned about the items in “the studio where he had spent most of his life,” with very similar results.) When asked to imagine that they were standing on the steps of the cathedral that is at one end of the Piazza, nearly all of the features mentioned, by both subjects, were ones that would have been to their right from that viewpoint, and very few things on the left were recalled. When asked to imagine standing at the opposite end of the square, facing the cathedral, most of the features they mentioned were ones on the other, previously neglected, side, which was now to their right. Presumably, the patients were forming a mental image of the Piazza, as viewed from the specified location, and attempting to read off the features around it from their imagery. Clearly knowledge of features on both sides (presumably mostly gained before they became ill) was in their memory, but they were unable to access all of it normally from their imagery.

Optional

Ramachandran V.S. and Blakeslee, S. (1998). Phantoms in the brain

  • Ch. 6 (neglect) available from Canvas:Reading List
  • Ch. 7 (anosognosia- not important, but cool)