The aim of this course is to introduce the students to important recent advances and emerging new trends in cognitive science research.
The focus of the course will be on predictive processing, an emerging new paradigm in cognitive science purportedly providing a unified theoretical framework for understanding perception, thought and action. Predictive processing has developed primarily out of the predictive coding paradigm in theoretical computational neuroscience. While predictive coding has for the most part been confined to the research of vision, predictive processing has generalized its theoretical framework so as to encompass cognition as a whole. After a brief conceptual and historical introduction to predictive processing, the first part of the course will be dedicated to Shannon’s information theory, and Bayesian methods in computational neuroscience - two theoretical pillars of predictive coding. Building from this, the second part of the course will provide an account of the main theoretical tenets of predictive processing focusing on Karl Friston’s formulations and the philosophical reception of his ideas (Hohwy, Clark). The last part of the course will present both important extensions of the predictive processing framework to others areas of research as well as highlight the main critical objections leveled at the framework as a whole.
- Izvođač: Matija Jelača