Yanchao Bi
Weaving Language and Vision in the Human Brain
Speaker: Yanchao Bi, PhD, Harvard University
Human semantic knowledge extends far beyond what can be learned from direct sensory experience. We know that birds descended from dinosaurs and that freedom differs from democracy, despite never perceiving such relations directly. How does the human brain acquire and represent such knowledge? In this talk, I will present evidence from populations with profoundly different sensory and language experiences, nonhuman primates, neuropsychological patients, and computational models. Together, these studies suggest that human semantic knowledge is supported by both sensory-grounded and language-mediated representations, which interact to shape how knowledge is acquired and organized in the brain. Beyond communication, language enables knowledge to extend beyond individual experience and may provide a neurocognitive foundation for cumulative human knowledge.
About Yanchao Bi
Yanchao Bi is a Boya professor in School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Institute for Artificial Intelligence, at Peking University. She received her PhD from the Department of Psychology, Harvard University, working on the cognitive process of language in the laboratory of Dr. Alfonso Caramazza. In 2006 she established her laboratory at Beijing Normal University and moved to Peking University in 2024. Her lab focuses on the study of functional and neural architecture associated with semantic memory, knowledge representation, and language processing, using cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, multi-modal neuroimaging, computation modeling and other research methods.