Workshop: Localizing Representations in the Brain with Neuroimaging Technologies

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports an interdisciplinary workshop that critically evaluates the use of neuroimaging technology as a window into the representational content of neural activity. The workshop will provide a context for critically examining the empirical significance of appeals to representations. It will bring together philosophers and neuroscientists with overlapping interests in conceptual and empirical challenges related to the search for representations in the brain. The primary goal of the workshop is to identify empirical criteria for individuating representational states and specifying their content within the domains of memory, perception, and action. The workshop will result in a collection of journal articles published in an open access venue that will demonstrate the value of focused interdisciplinary collaborations between philosophers and neuroscientists. The curated program and organizational plan will also be widely shared after the workshop, along with reflections on its effectiveness. This interdisciplinary workshop brings together philosophers and neuroscientists to focus on the notion of representation and its relationships to neural processes. Neuroscientists investigating human cognition with neuroimaging technology often describe their findings in terms of representations. This concept is ubiquitous, but its meaning and significance varies. Sometimes representations are treated as genuine phenomena that are the targets of investigation and intervention, and at other times the concept is used as a theoretically insignificant stand-in for claims about information carried by or transformed in neural processes. If the concept of representation carries any empirical significance, fully exploiting that significance requires an account of what kind of evidence is required to justify claims about the content and role such a state plays in realizing cognitive capacities. In light of this, workshop participants will focus on three central questions: What is the significance of identifying a pattern of brain activity as a representation? What evidence is required to make such an attribution? Can neuroimaging technologies provide that evidence? Approaching these questions from a purely empirical perspective may end up reinforcing the ambiguities already present in the cognitive neuroscience literature and doing so from a purely philosophical perspective risks generating accounts of representation that are not amenable to empirical investigation. An integrative, interdisciplinary approach seems to be the best path forward. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.