NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness

“Representational Format” Workshop

Tuesday, November 26^th, 2024

Location: 19 Washington Square North, 2^nd Floor Events Space at NYU

Sponsored by 19 Washington Square North and the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness

Registration: HERE

Zoom: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/91752387485

The topic of Representational Format deals with the different ways that information can be encoded. The sentence ‘a cat is on the mat’ and a picture of a cat on a mat both represent the cat as being on the mat, but they do so in different ways. What is the nature of this difference? Are there only two ways to represent, or more? How do various cases, such as analog clocks, mental imagery, iconic gestures in sign language, or retinopy in the brain, fit in? This workshop brings together speakers from Philosophy, Psychology, and Linguistics to address this important topic.

Schedule:

8:30-9:00       bagels and coffee

9:00-10:30     Gabriel Greenberg (Associate Professor of Philosophy, UCLA)

          “Retinotopy and Representation”

10:30-10:45   coffee break

10:45-12:15   Gabriel Oak Rabin (Associate Professor of Philosophy, NYUAD + NYU)

           “The Structure of Iconic Representation”

 

12:15-1:15     Lunch (provided onsite)

 

1:15-2:45       Susan Carey (Henry A. Morss, Jr., and Elizabeth W. Morss Professor of Psychology, Emerita, Harvard)

           “Three formats for representing same and different”

2:45-3:00       coffee break

3:00-4:30       Kathryn Davidson (Professor of Linguistics, Harvard)

            “Iconic vs symbolic representations: new views on the evidence from within language”

4:30-4:45       coffee break

4:45-6:15       Sam Clarke (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, USC)

            “The Biggie Smalls Problem in Infant Number Cognition”

 

NYU Abu Dhabi Event Website: HERE 

 

Talk Titles and Abstracts (by order of presentation)

Gabriel Greenberg (Associate Professor of Philosophy, UCLA)

Title: Retinotopy and Representation

Abstract: It is well known that over a dozen areas in the early layers of the human visual cortex exhibit spatial organization that mirrors the layout of the retina. It is much less clear what this means at the level of representation. Though such regions look like literal pictures in the brain, philosophers and neuroscientists alike have often been skeptical of such appearances. In this talk I will argue that that, in fact, retinotopic areas not only produce iconic representations, but representations that function very much like pictures. Drawing on parallels between ventral stream processing and neural network models of computer vision, I will suggest that early visual computations exploit metric correspondences between functional space in the brain and space in the world, in a manner characteristic of iconicity.

 

Gabriel Oak Rabin (Associate Professor of Philosophy, NYU Abu Dhabi)

Title: The Structure of Iconic Representation

Abstract: This paper develops a theory of iconic representation. We begin by examining prior proposals that appeal to the parts principle, according to which iconic representations are those where parts of the vehicle represent parts of the content. Then we develop our positive theory, according to which iconic representations are “locatively structured” collections of analog representations. We also examine how the resulting theory identifies the relationship between the iconic and the analog, precisifies the notions of a functional space and functional part, and generates an interesting taxonomy of representational systems.

 

Susan Carey (Henry A. Morss, Jr., and Elizabeth W. Morss Professor of Psychology, Emerita, Harvard)

Title: Three formats for representing same and different

Abstract: How are concepts mentally represented?  I will approach an answer via a case study of three different ways animals represent the abstract relations same and different.   I begin by sketching evidence that human infants, and a wide range of animals, including insects, have representations of these relations.  I then sketch evidence for evolutionary and ontogenetic discontinuities in mental representations with these contents.  Three different formats of representation of same and different can make sense of these data: (1) Implicit representations (in which the content is carried by computations); (2) Iconic representations; (3) Discursive representations.  I present evidence that animals and babies have only the first two.  The capacity for symbolic concepts for these relations may depend, both in evolution in ontogenesis, on the human capacity for natural language. 

 

Kathryn Davidson (Professor of Linguistics, Harvard)

Title: Iconic vs symbolic representations: new views on the evidence from within language
Abstract: We often look to externalized language as a source of evidence, or at least hypotheses, for the structure of symbolic representations in the mind, such as predicate-argument structure, the interaction of logical operators, quantification, modal operators, etc. I’ll focus in this talk on the way that symbolic and iconic representations interact, and critically also the ways they fail to interact, in externalized language, drawing evidence from both signed and spoken languages. Based on these observations I’ll argue for a critical information structural role that discrete symbolic representations provide that iconic analog representations cannot, with an eye toward the question of what this means for such representations outside the context of information exchange/externalized language.

 

Sam Clarke (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, USC)

Title: The Biggie Smalls Problem in Infant Number Cognition

Abstract: In ‘subitizing’ tasks, infants accurately discriminate small collections, up to a set-size of ~3, after which performance falls to chance. It remains unclear, however, why performance consistently falls to chance under these conditions given that infants possess an equally well-attested capacity to approximately enumerate larger collections. I call this The Biggie Smalls Problem. The present paper clarifies The Problem, notes that it is exacerbated by influential ways of thinking about infant numerical cognition and argues that existing ‘solutions’ to The Problem are unsatisfactory. It then develops an improved solution, which turns on independently motivated claims about the format of the representations involved and the signature limits of infant working memory. Beyond generating testable predictions, this improved solution has ramifications for the architecture of numerical cognition, the structure of perceptual representations, and the ways in which perceptual states refer.