Docent lecture: Cognition in Context: It’s About Time!
Science and Information Technology
William Hedley Thompson will hold his docent lecture with the title: "Cognition in Context: It’s About Time!"
William Hedley Thompson will hold his docent lecture with the title: "Cognition in Context: It’s About Time!"
Throughout our daily lives, we adapt to different environments, expectations, and social roles as required by the context. The context—whether social, technological, emotional, or otherwise—acts as a constraint that limits which thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are active at certain times. How we act, what we say, what we feel, and what we remember all depend on the context we find ourselves in.
Understanding how much we differ between contexts, and understanding the limits of how much one person can adapt to different contexts, has been the overarching aim I have been targeting since the start of my research career. Although it has not been a straightforward journey. Initially, I tackled methodological questions to understand how the brain mechanistically can be so effective at dynamically adapting by viewing the brain as a temporal network. Then, my research spiraled into larger, more general questions relating to temporal issues relating to data and our best scientific practices. In recent years, I have been focusing on behavior, behavior over time, and deriving "cognitive network profiles." So, for this talk, I will weave the different topics together and look to the future where I am gearing up to (finally) answer the questions about the limits of our contextual adaptation.