The Expression, Communication, and the Origins of Meaning (ECOM) research group was established in 2010 by Dorit Bar-On at UNC-Chapel Hill, as part of a 4-year NSF grant for collaborative research received in 2009 [award #0925896]. In the summer of 2014 ECOM moved to the University of Connecticut, where it has received a start-up grant from the UConn Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. ECOM is affiliated with the UConn Philosophy Department, the UConn Cognitive Science Program, the CT Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the UConn Humanities Institute.
To date, ECOM has brought together hundreds of researchers, faculty, and students, from several disciplines (philosophy, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, biology, and more), through its regular meetings, speaker series, workshops, and conferences. Members of ECOM have worked on different aspects of the ECOM research areas, while collaborating and contributing to its central themes. To learn more, visit our members page, our research page, and our list of publications. Members also participate in various ECOM events, including reading groups, speaker series, workshops and seminars.
Please contact Dorit (dorit.bar-on@uconn.edu) with questions or comments. To be added to the ECOM listserv, please contact Aliyar Ozercan (aliyar.ozercan@uconn.edu).
Upcoming Events
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2/10
ECOM Speaker Series: Alison Springle
ECOM Speaker Series: Alison Springle
Friday, February 10th, 2023
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Storrs Campus FSB220
ECOM Speaker Series will host Alison Springle (Oklahoma University, Philosophy). The title of her talk is "Radicalizing Practical Representations." The event will be held in Family Studies 220, and will be broadcasted via Zoom. For details, contact aliyar.ozercan@uconn.eduContact Information: aliyar.ozercan@uconn.edu
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2/24
CogSci Colloquium: Thomas Naselaris
CogSci Colloquium: Thomas Naselaris
Friday, February 24th, 2023
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Storrs Campus Oak Hall Room 117
Speaker: Dr. Thomas Naselaris, an Associate Professor from Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota.
Time & Location: 4PM, Friday February 24th, 2023, in Oak Hall Room 117. Please RSVP on the COGS colloquium page.
Talk Title: “Why Do We Have Mental Images?”
Abstract: Everyone who experiences mental imagery is the world expert on the contents of their own mental images. We argue that this privileged perspective on one’s own mental images provides very limited understanding about the function of mental imagery, which can only be understood by proposing and testing hypotheses about the computational work that mental images do. We propose that mental imagery functions as a useful form of inference that is conditioned on visual beliefs. We implement this form of inference in a simple generative model of natural scenes, and show that it makes testable predictions about differences in tuning to seen and imagined features. We confirm these predictions with a large-scale fMRI experiment in which human brain activity was sampled while subjects generated hundreds of mental images. We speculate that ongoing mental imagery may impact the structure of noise correlations in the visual system, and present a preliminary analysis of the Natural Scenes Dataset that appears to be consistent with these speculations.
Bio: Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the Medical Discovery Team on Optical Imaging and Brain Science at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research. He is co-founder and currently Executive Chair of the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience.Contact Information: crystal.mills@uconn.edu
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2/25
Kinds of Action Graduate Conference
Kinds of Action Graduate Conference
Saturday, February 25th, 2023
12:00 AM - 11:59 PM
Storrs Campus Zoom
Our fourth graduate conference will take place virtually on Sat Feb 25. Our keynote speakers will be Prof. Jon Schwenkler (Philosophy, Florida State) and Prof. Lucy O'Brien. Please check our website (http://ecomresearchgroup.com/) for updates and full line-up.Contact Information: aliyar.ozercan@uconn.edu
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3/30
ECOM Spotlight Series: Hady By
ECOM Spotlight Series: Hady By
Thursday, March 30th, 2023
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Storrs Campus Zoom
TBAContact Information: aliyar.ozercan@uconn.edu
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