VSAONLINE. SEASON 11. November 3, 20:00GMT. Staffan Larsson.

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Oct 30, 2025, 5:50:12 PMOct 30

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Dear all,

Welcome to the next talk of Season 11 on VSAONLINE. Staffan Larsson from Gothenburg University, Sweden will give a talk

”Finding Answers to Questions: Bridging between Type-based and Computational Neuroscience Approaches”

Date: November 3, 2025

Time: 20:00 GMT (DO NOT FORGET THE WINTERTIME OFFSET in EUROPE)

Zoom: https://ltu-se.zoom.us/j/65564790287

WEB: https://bit.ly/vsaonline

Title: Finding Answers to Questions: Bridging between Type-based and Computational Neuroscience Approaches

Abstract: The talk outlines an account of how the brain might process questions and answers in linguistic interaction, focusing on accessing answers in memory and combining questions and answers into propositions. To enable this, we provide an approximation of the lambda calculus implemented in the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA), a neural implementation of a Vector Symbolic Architecture. The account builds a bridge between the type-based accounts of propositions in memory (as in the treatments of belief by Ranta, 1994 and Cooper, 2023) and the suggestion for question answering made by Eliasmith (2013), where question answering is described in terms of transformations of structured representations in memory providing an answer. We will take such representations to correspond to beliefs of the agent. On Cooper’s analysis, beliefs are considered to be types which have a record structure closely related to the structure which Eliasmith codes in vector representations (Larsson et al., 2023). Thus the act of answering a question can be seen to have a neural base in a vector transformation translatable in Eliasmith’s system to activity of spiking neurons and to correspond to using an item in memory (a belief) to provide an answer to the question.