Special Issue Editors: Mark Sprevak and Francis Fallon
Representations are widely believed to be among the essential ingredients for explaining cognition. In cognitive psychology, behavior and decision making are modelled in terms of computations performed over representations. In neuroscience, responses of single cells, neural populations, and structural features are claimed to function as representations for the agent in question. In AI, what machines learn is often characterized in terms of the kinds of representations those machines acquire and how they manipulate them.
However, although the term ‘representation’ makes frequent appearances, there is little agreement about how it should be understood in either neuroscience or AI.
The aim of this special issue is to obtain views of leading philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists, and individuals from other cognitive science disciplines about how we should answer (one or both) of the following questions:
- How should we understand talk of representation in the brain?
- How should we understand talk of representation in AI systems?
Given the recent use of AI models to describe brain activity, and the increasing adoption of large, hard-to-interpret models in AI, we expect there to be some productive interchange between these two questions. Authors may, however, wish to focus exclusively on one domain.
Contributors to the special issue include:
- Marc Artiga
- Ben Baker
- David Barack
- Daniel Burnston
- Patrick Butlin
- Rosa Cao
- Mazviita Chirimuuta
- Dimitri Coelho Mollo
- Frances Egan
- Lotem Elber
- Chris Eliasmith
- Michael Furlong
- Atticus Geiger
- Devin Gouvêa
- Olivia Guest
- Jacqueline Harding
- Inês Hipólito
- Thomas Icard
- Celeste Kidd
- Colin Klein
- John Krakauer
- Grace Lindsay
- Fintan Declan Mallory
- Andrea Martin
- Manolo Martinez
- Melanie Mitchell
- Kevin Mitchell
- Megan Peters
- Gualtiero Piccinini
- Russ Poldrack
- William Ramsey
- Tomas Ryan
- Bill Thompson
- Alex Williams
- Alex Yang
- Dhara Yu
Deadline and Schedule:
Pre-submission inquiries are welcome at any time (mark.sprevak@ed.ac.uk).
Manuscript Submission Deadline: 28th February 2025.
Word limit: between 4,000 and 10,000 words.
Estimated Publication Date: 1st Quarter of 2026
Instructions for Author’s Submission can be found here.