Gregor Michael Hörzer

Universität Osnabrück | UOS · Institute of Cognitive Science

Physicalism is a metaphysical thesis easily presented in slogan form – there is nothing over and above the physical – but notoriously difficult to formulate precisely. "Understanding physicalism" combines insights from contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics to present a new account of physical properties and metaphysical dependence and, on...

According to Sandro Nannini’s Time and Consciousness in Cognitive Naturalism, we can draw an analogy between the shift in the conception of time that occurred in physics with the introduction of relativity theory and a shift towards a scientifically more graspable functional concept of phenomenal consciousness. This analogy is meant to persuade us...

This paper addresses the question how generic microcircuits of neurons in different parts of the cortex can attain and maintain different computational specializations. We show that if stochastic variations in the dynamics of local microcircuits are correlated with signals related to functional improvements of the brain (e.g. in the control of beha...

Short-term memory requires communication between multiple brain regions that collectively mediate the encoding and maintenance of sensory information. It has been suggested that oscillatory synchronization underlies intercortical communication. Yet, whether and how distant cortical areas cooperate during visual memory remains elusive. We examined n...

Processing and storage of sensory information is based on the interaction between different neural populations rather than the isolated activity of single neurons. In order to characterize the dynamic interaction and transient cooperation of sub-circuits within a neural network, multivariate autoregressive (MVAR) models have proven to be an importa...