LIDA Seminar series 9th January 2020

This seminar will be held in the Room 11.09, Worsley Building, at 12.30 on Thursday 9^th January.

Seminars are free and open for all to attend. No prior booking is required.

Each presentation will be followed by a short Q&A session.

#LIDAseminar

Presentation: An up close and personal look at the Universe’s ultimate data compression and communication system

By: Professor Mark Mon-Williams (University of Leeds)

Abstract: Would you reach for the red pill – or the blue one? The role of the psychologist is to capture the bit of information generated by your action choice. The psychologist and your brain share the common goal of trying to make predictions about the action – the psychologist attempts to predict which action she will observe, whilst the brain tries to predict the information generated by the action. The action itself is the product of many million bits of data– information that is stowed in genes and stored in neural circuits fashioned by a lifetime of experience. Your decision is shaped by both ‘priors’ and the rich informational milieu within which you operate. In fact, your whole existence is predicated on the exchange of information between an internal realm of biological cells and an external domain of elementary fermions – two separate worlds falling on opposite sides of a Markov blanket.

I will discuss a series of experiments motivated by this ‘information theory’ perspective that (hopefully) provide some insights into human behaviour. The more general aim of the talk is to highlight that there may be a single theoretical framework that is able to unite data science and psychology.