Material constraints enabling human cognition

Abstract

Material constraints enabling human cognition Compared to our closest living relatives, who typically use fewer than 100 words, humans can build vocabularies of tens of hundreds of thousands of words. The ERC-funded Advanced Grant project ‘Material Constraints enabling Human Cognition’, or ‘MatCo’, will find out why. It will use novel insights from human neurobiology. These will be translated into mathematically exact computational models to find new answers to long-standing questions in cognitive science, linguistics and philosophy. The project will also explore how semantic meaning is implemented for gestures and words and, more specifically, for referential and categorical terms. To identify human cognitive capacities, MatCo will develop models replicating structural differences between human and non-human primate brains. The results will shed light on the biologically constrained networks.