User:Arbib
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Dr. Michael A. Arbib
Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science University Professor Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience and Psychology Director, USC Brain Project
Research Topics
- Computational and cognitive neuroscience
- Mirror neurons and action recognition
- Brain mechanisms of language and their evolution
- Epistemology
- Neural networks
- Simulation
- Schema theory
- Neuroinformatics
Research Overview
The thrust of Michael Arbib's work is expressed in the title of his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics (McGraw-Hill, 1964). The brain is not a computer in the current technological sense, but he has based his career on the argument that we can learn much about machines from studying brains, and much about brains from studying machines. He has thus always worked for an interdisciplinary environment in which computer scientists and engineers can talk to neuroscientists and cognitive scientists.
His primary research focus is on the coordination of perception and action. This is tackled at two levels: via schema theory, which is applicable both in top-down analyses of brain function and human cognition as well as in studies of machine vision and robotics; and through the detailed analysis of neural networks, working closely with the experimental findings of neuroscientists on humans and monkeys. He is also engaged in research on the evolution of brain mechanisms for human language, pursuing the Mirror System Hypothesis that links language parity (the fact that what the speaker intends is roughly what the hearer understands) to the properties of the mirror system for grasping -- neurons active for both the execution and observation of actions -- to explain (amongst many other things) why human brains can acquire sign language as readily as speech.
The author or editor of almost 40 books, Arbib has most recently edited "Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot" (with Jean-Marc Fellous, Oxford University Press, 2005) and "From Action to Language via the Mirror System" (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Contact Information
| E-mail: | arbib@usc.edu |
| Mailing Address: | University of Southern California |
| USC Brain Project | |
| HNB 03 | |
| Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520 | |
| Office Location: | HNB 03 |
| Office Phone: | (213) 740-9220 |
| Lab Location: | HNB 10 |
| Fax: | (213) 821-3046 |
Education
- B.Sc. (Hons.) First Class Honours in Pure Mathematics, University of Sydney, Australia, 1960.
- Ph.D. Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1963.
Selected Publications
Complete PubMed search
Complete Google Scholar search
Arbib, M.A., (2005) From Monkey-like Action Recognition to Human Language: An Evolutionary Framework for Neurolinguistics (with commentaries and author's response), Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28:105-167. (Supplemental commentaries and the author's "electronic response" are at Behavioral and Brain Sciences; see Link.) -PubMed -Link
Oztop, E., Bradley, N.S., and Arbib, M.A., (2004) Infant grasp learning: A computational model Exp. Brain Res. 158: 480-503. -PubMed
Bota, M., and Arbib, M.A., (2004) Integrating Databases and Expert Systems for the Analysis of Brain Structures: Connections, Similarities, and Homologies, Neuroinformatics, 2:19-58. -PubMed
Arbib, M.A., and Fellous, J.-M., (2004) Emotions: from brain to robot, Trends in Cognitive Science, 8: 554-561. -PubMed
Arbib, M.A., Billard, A., Iacoboni, M., and Oztop, E.,(2000) Synthetic Brain Imaging: Grasping, Mirror Neurons and Imitation, Neural Networks, 13: 975-997. -PubMed
Fagg AH, Arbib MA.(1998) Modeling Parietal-Premotor Interactions in Primate Control of Grasping. Neural Networks, 11:1277-1303 (1998). -PubMed
Guazzelli A, Corbacho FJ, Bota M, Arbib MA.(1998) Affordances, Motivation, and the World Graph Theory. Adaptive Behavior 6:435-471 (1998).
Dominey PF, Arbib MA, Joseph J-P.(1995) A Model of Corticostriatal Plasticity for Learning Associations and Sequences. J Cog Neurosci 7:311-336 (1995).
Arbib MA, Bischoff A, Fagg AH, Grafton ST.(1994) Synthetic PET: Analyzing Large-Scale Properties of Neural Networks. Human Brain Mapping 2:225-233 (1994).
Schweighofer, N., Arbib, M. A., and Kawato, M., (1998) Role of the Cerebellum in Reaching Quickly and Accurately: I. A Functional Anatomical Model of Dynamics Control, European Journal of Neuroscience, 10: 86-94. -PubMed
