Colloquium Natural & Life Sciences - Anelis Kaiser-Trujillo & Julia Veit

Session Topic: Brain, Cognition and Gender

Topic Anelis Kaiser-Trujillo - Sex/Gender in the Brain

In this talk, I will contextualize the search for “sex differences” in neurolinguistics and in cognitive neuroscience in general. I will discuss the search for differences in functional activation between “the female” and “the male” group by asking, for instance, what “the female” and “the male” is for the brain, by comparing “sex” differences versus “gender” differences, or by scrutinizing the fixation on differences instead of similiarities (Hyde 2005) in comparative gender identity research. By these means, I will reflect upon the meaning of a “neuroscience of sex/gender” and the role of neurofeminism for the public and for society.

Topic Julia Veit (invited Emmy Noether Group Leader) - Circuits for distributed visual processing

Our visual system is processing incredible amounts of data with lightning speed. The wiring of this efficient system into parallel and serial processing streams has been the focus of intense research over the past decades and is also the example for many of our current AI systems. A lot of progress has been made in understanding how visual information is processed in the different visual areas, the different cortical layers and between excitatory and inhibitory neuronal subtypes. This presentation will focus on the circuit mechanisms and potential role of rhythmic neuronal activity in routing visual information within and between different visual cortical areas.