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David Kaufmann Neuroscientific Research on Moral Judgement In my research project at GSN I intend to investigate the overt and covert philosophical conceptual premises of the neuroscientific approach to investigating moral judgement and the importance of these premises for interpreting neuroscientific results in philosophical terms as well as in ordinary language. The first step in order to do this would be to investigate the links between philosophical, psychological and neuroscientific concepts employed in the explanation of moral judgement and their characteristic role in their theories of origin. For the seminar “Current Issues in philosophy and neurosciences” I’d like to propose to give a short introduction on one issue about the neuroscientific research on moral judgement that this first step could shed some light on and which I consider especially interesting: It has been a striking feature of neuroscientific experiments on moral judgements that they’re most often „nothing but“ psychological experiments performed in an fMRI scanner – and their results are most often „only“ used to back up already quite well confirmed psychological theories on moral judgement. When it comes to a philosophical or common language interpretation of these neuroscientific findings we must find that from a philosophical point of view they seem quite boring. They just confirm stuff that is already “known” from psychological research. The question that arises in regard of this matter is whether the situation that neuroscientific research on morality doesn’t seem to give great philosophical insights is owed to „structural“ reasons (for example due to conceptual constraints) or whether the reasons for that frustrating situation are just „coincidental“ (due to the fact that just occasionally nobody happened to do research otherwise). What does “conceptual constraints” mean here? I’d like to speak of “conceptual constraints” when we can’t talk in philosophical terms or ordinary language about what the neurosciences tell us about morality in their own scientific jargon. This could mean concretely that neuroscientific statements cannot be „translated“ in common ways of speaking but by „going the long way“ and being first translated into psychological terms – as a mere confirmation of already existing psychological hypotheses. According to this line of thought, anything that neuroscience can offer apart from the assertion of psychological hypothesises would be „lost in translation“. This would not only be a pity for the interested lay person, but also for the neuroscientist engaged in the investigation of moral judgement: It would be quite a blow if she would not be able to explain her findings to laymen apart from what can be proven by her efforts in psychological research. As a philosopher I see it as a thrilling task to investigate whether such constraints exist by examining the links between philosophical, psychological and neuroscientific concepts that play a role in the philosophical interpretation of neuroscientific results on moral judgement. The resulting findings could in the best case tell us whether and to what extent a direct philosophical or ordinary language interpretation of neuroscientific results is possible – and in how far taking “the long way” would really leave everything that doesn’t derive from psychological hypothesises in limbo. If such a translation (direct or indirect) should be possible, it will be an even more fascinating next step to check where there is room for misunderstandings and misinterpretations of which I daresay that there will be plenty of. But this will be a different story. My short talk or my poster would give an account of how such constraints could look like in theory, my reasons for thinking that they are at least limited, an outlook what I expect to find and possible next steps. I would set these matters in context of an overall presentation of my dissertation project. 12
Emiliano Zaccarella On the Nature of Merge: Neuroanatomical Correlates of Local Syntactic Structures in Natural Language Processing Probabilistic fiber tracking approaches to language-relevant areas have recently identified a dorsal stream going from pars opercularis (BA 44) to the posterior temporal cortex via the superior longitudinal fasciculus, and a more ventral stream going from the frontal operculum (FOC) to the anterior temporal cortex via the uncinate fasciculum. According to the ‘two-pathways’ model, it has been suggested that the former stream supports the processing of non-adjacent elements in hierarchically more complex sentences and possibly the identification of the constituency structure, while the latter stream supports the combinations of adjacent elements in a sequence. Even though many studies contrast this view a direct comparison with the stimulus material so far employed will show that the model above is still adequate and preferable over alternative suggestions. A corrected set of stimuli for a following fMRI analysis will be finally discussed. Fernando Ramirez Orientation Encoding in the FFA is Selective to Faces: Evidence from Multivoxal Pattern Analysis The fusiform face area (FFA) is a region of the human ventral visual pathway that exhibits a stronger response to faces than objects. The role of this region within the face perception network is not well understood, and its selectivity has been debated. Furthermore, it is unclear which properties of visual stimuli are reflected in the patterns of activation of this region. Here we directly explored the encoding of orientation using a combination of fMRI and multivoxel pattern analysis. We presented subjects with synthetic images of faces and cars that were rotated in depth and presented either above or below fixation. We explored orientation related information available in fine-grained activity patterns in FFA and early visual cortex. Distributed signals from the FFA allowed above-chance classification of within-category orientation only for faces. This result generalized to faces presented in different retinotopic positions. In contrast, classification in early visual cortex resulted in equal, above-chance classification of face and car orientation, but only when trained and tested on corresponding retinotopic positions. Classification across position was substantially decreased for both categories in early visual cortex. We conclude that category-selective effects of stimulus orientation are reflected in the fine grained patterns of activation in FFA, and that the structure of these patterns is partially translation invariant. 13
Page 1: ISSUES IN PHILOSOPHY AND NEUROSCIEN
Page 4 and 5: PANEL 1: CONSCIOUSNESS I Program Mo
Page 6 and 7: Wedesday, April 19 th PANEL 6: WILL
Page 8 and 9: Armin Bahl Smarter than One Might T
Page 10 and 11: Bianca van Kemenade Multisensory In
Page 14 and 15: Georgina Torbet Cognitive Neuroscie
Page 16 and 17: Ryszard Auksztulewicz Recurrent Neu
Page 18 and 19: Smadar Ovadia-Caro Reduction of Int
Page 20 and 21: Berlin Faculty List of participants

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