Past Colloquium Speakers

From NEBL

Friday, October 12, 2007 11:00 AM
WRB 2023

Michael Mozer, University of Colorado
Rational Models of Cognitive Control

Human behavior is remarkably flexible. An individual who drives the same route each day easily adjusts for a traffic jam or to pick up groceries. Any theory of human cognition must explain not only routine behavior, but how behavior is flexibly modulated by the current environment and goals. In this talk, we discuss this ability, often referred to as cognitive control. We focus on rational models, which argue that cognitive control optimizes performance to the statistical structure of the environment, subject to limitations on current knowledge or processing hardware. We describe how characteristics of the environment and task domain can be estimated from experience, and how these characteristics can then be exploited to make behavior more efficient. We validate our theories via simulation studies that model human data from tasks involving visual search (locating a visual target in a cluttered display) and object categorization.

Michael Mozer is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he joined the faculty in 1988. Dr. Mozer received his Ph.D. in psychology and cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto with Geoffrey Hinton. His primary research focus is on computational models in cognitive neuroscience, particular phenomena of visual attention and its pathologies, perceptual learning, and awareness. His interests include application of machine learning techniques to problems in engineering and artificial intelligence. Dr. Mozer has served on technical advisory boards of multiple start-up companies involved in data mining (including Athene, Umbria Communications, and AnswerOn Technologies), and is a co-founder and research scientist at Sensory Inc. which focuses embedded speech technologies for consumer electronics.