[Colloquium] THURSDAY 10/11 | Marc Berman at the Computational Social Science Workshop

[Nora Nickels via Colloquium]

THE COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE WORKSHOP PRESENTSMARC BERMANASSISTANT
PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AND THE DIRECTOR OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL NEUROSCIENCE
LABORATORYTHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO



The Computational Social Science Workshop
<https://macss.uchicago.edu/content/computation-workshop>at the University
of Chicago cordially invites you to attend this week’s talk:


THE FRACTAL BRAIN AND COGNITIVE EFFORT
<https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/marc_berman/blob/master/2018_berman_suppression_of_scale.pdf>


Summary: Cognitive effort is often easily experienced and yet hard to
define. Is the cognitive effort of learning a new task related to the
cognitive effort of having to remember and manipulate more items in memory?
What about the increased cognitive effort that accompanies aging or
physical and mental illness. Here I present a theory that cognitive effort
is related to the fractal scaling of brain hemodynamics (as measured with
fMRI) and with the fractal scaling of the brains electrical activity (as
measured with EEG). From analyzing a number of datasets that manipulated
cognitive effort in a number of ways, we find consistently that higher
fractal scaling is associated with decreased cognitive effort. This work
could help to identify biological markers that index how much cognitive
effort an individual is exerting.


THURSDAY, 10/11/201811:00AM-12:20PMKENT 120


A light lunch will be provided by Cedars Mediterranean Kitchen.



Marc Berman is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and is the Director of
the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago. In
his research he applies novel statistical and computational models to
quantify brain networks and applies those metrics to broader psychological
phenomena such as self-control, depression, anxiety and cognitive effort.
He and his lab are also interested in quantifying the physical and social
environment to better understand brain-environment interactions and how
those interactions can be used to understand human behavior. In particular,
Berman and his team are trying to understand why natural environments have
beneficial effects on body and mind. Berman received his Ph.D. in Cognitive
Neuroscience and Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University
of Michigan in 2010. He is the recipient of the 2018 Association for
Psychological Science’s (APS) Early Career Research Award and the Neubauer
Faculty Development Fellowship for excellence in teaching and mentorship.
His work has been featured in many publications including the Atlantic
Monthly, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Boston Globe, Chicago
Magazine, the Toronto Star and the Wall Street Journal.




------------------------------

The 2018-2019 Computational Social Science Workshop
<https://macss.uchicago.edu/content/computation-workshop>meets each
Thursday from 11 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. in Kent 120. All interested faculty and
graduate students are welcome.

Students in the Masters of Computational Social Science program are
expected to attend and join the discussion by posting a comment on the issues
page  <https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/marc_berman/issues>of
the workshop’s public repository on GitHub.
<https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/marc_berman> Further
instructions are documented in the Computational Social Science
Workshop’s README
on Github. <https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/README>


-- 
Nora Nickels
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Comparative Human Development
Preceptor, Masters in Computational Social Science
Fellow, Institute for Mind and Biology
The University of Chicago
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