The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science has named Zina B. Ward (Florida State) the winner of its 2022 Popper Prize.
The Popper Prize, named for Karl Popper, is awarded to the perfect articles showing within the journal which concern themselves with matters within the philosophy of science to which Popper made a major contribution, as decided by the Editors-in-Chief and the British Society for the Philosophy of Science Committee.
Professor Ward received the prize for her “Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains“. Right here’s what the judges needed to say about it:
In ‘Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Strategy to Information Aggregation throughout Brains’, Zina B. Ward tackles a methodological concern of central significance in cognitive neuroscience: learn how to register information from a number of topics in a typical spatial framework regardless of vital variation in human mind construction, that’s, learn how to map exercise in several topics’ neural constructions onto a single template or into a typical representational area. In a typical fMRI-based investigation, experimenters run a sequence of topics via a scanner and, if the experiment is fruitful, draw conclusions, from the information collected, in regards to the useful contributions of sure areas of the mind—that, for example, the ACC regulates emotional responses to ache. Such work presupposes normalization of the pictures from numerous topics, in order to permit experimenters to say that, throughout topics, the identical space of the mind exhibited elevated exercise throughout scanning. The necessities of normalization might sound to pose a mere technical downside; maybe with laborious work and ingenuity, neuroscientists can establish the one, appropriate methodology for pairing mind areas or areas throughout topics. Ward argues in opposition to this type of monism. For principled causes to do with the extent and nature of variation in neural construction—for instance, variation within the location of sulci relative to cytoarchitectonic boundaries—Ward argues that the selection of spatial framework and methodology of registration should range, relying on the aim of a given research. No single methodology will concurrently impact the entire appropriate pairings of relevance to cognitive neuroscience. From a sensible standpoint, such methodological pluralism could seem daunting, and it may additionally appear excessively theory-laden. In response to such issues, Ward gives and defends a sequence of constructive proposals regarding learn how to implement registration pluralism.
For its spectacular theoretical and sensible contributions to a difficulty of central significance in cognitive neuroscience, the BJPS Co-Editors-in-Chief and the BSPS Committee choose ‘Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Strategy to Information Aggregation throughout Brains’ to be worthy of the 2022 BJPS Popper Prize.
The prize consists of £500.
Three others acquired honorable point out. They’re:
You’ll be able to be taught extra in regards to the Popper Prize and see a listing of previous winners here.
