Language Science Lunch Talk - Xinchi Yu
Language Science Lunch Talk - Xinchi Yu
Mapping the Neural Taxonomy of Mental Objects in Moment-to-moment Cognition
Abstract: We mentally represent all kinds of objects across a variety of tasks and source modalities (e.g., from a linguistic or a visual source). Recent work has proposed that mental objects are represented by content-free, reassignable pointers (or indexicals, tokens, object files) in our moment-to-moment processing. Are all mental objects represented by the same set of pointers? If not, where should we draw the lines between different kinds of pointers? In this talk, I will discuss the roadmap of a novel research program aiming at unraveling the neural taxonomy of mental objects, by testing how the neural markers for pointers generalize across different paradigms, task goals, source modalities (and more).
About: "My name is Xinchi Yu, and I'm a fifth-year PhD student (as of Fall 2024; now a "candidate") at the University of Maryland, College Park, supervised by Ellen Lau. I'm in the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) Program, and I'm also affiliated to the Department of Linguistics. I am also working with Weizhen (Zane) Xie in the Department of Psychology on a couple of fun projects."
Lunch served at 12:15