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Workshop: “COmputational NeuroscieNce of Event CogniTion (CONNECT)”

The Matariki COmputational NeuroscieNce of Event CogniTion (CONNECT) workshop brought together more than 40 academics and students from around the world for a series of 15 seminars and talks held over three days (12-14 February). Attendees from 9 research institutions gathered at the Dunedin campus of the University of Otago. This included representation from four of the Matariki Universities; Tübingen, Uppsala, Queen’s and, of course, Otago. Topics discussed spanned the disciplines of Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, Linguistics, Computational Neuroscience, and Artificial Intelligence with an aim to taking a multidisciplinary approach to understanding event cognition and how it shapes our perception, memory and understanding of the world. Highlights included a very well-attended public lecture by guest speakers Prof Jeff Zacks, discussing how movies had hijacked the brain’s capacity to divide the world into event sequences, and a fascinating talk from another guest, Mark Sagar, describing the development of the virtual infant BabyX.

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