While people consider the human heart as the most important organ which provides constant supply of oxygen and blood to the body, the human brain is the most complex organ in the human body. This three-pound organ is the seat of intelligence, interpreter of the senses, initiator of body movement, and controller of behaviour. CityU’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) established the Brain research cluster in 2022 to bring scholars from different disciplines together, to promote research excellence of the study of the human brain and its impact on affective, behavioural, and cognitive functions as well as how individuals learn, communicate, feel, and think using neuroscience and advanced information technologies.

The two-day Second Annual Brain Research Cluster Symposium was organised by the Department of Media and Communication (COM) in hybrid mode between 31 March and 1 April 2023. Prof Fiona NAH Fui-hoon, Convenor of Brain research cluster and professor from COM kick-started the symposium by welcoming more than 250 participants online and more than 50 participants in-person. Next, Prof Christine HUANG Yi-hui, Associate Dean (Faculty and Research) of CLASS, remarked in her welcoming speech that the objective of Brain research cluster is to improve human wellbeing. “Unlike the traditional research methods that cover qualitative and quantitative survey, experiment or interviews, the brain cluster utilise neuroscience data collected by innovative ways, such as eye-tracker and EEG to capture the genuine and objective activity status of brain. It definitely offers new train of thought to further studies,” said Prof Huang. 

The keynote speech was given by Prof Rene WEBER from the University of California, Santa Barbara on “Media Neuroscience in the Communication Discipline – Select Examples from 2002 to 2022 and a Brief Look into the Future”. Prof Weber introduced a new research direction by giving an example from 2022, to combine computational and neuroscience research in order to explore the relationship of media and morality by analysing moral conflicts from movie scripts. Prof Weber stayed and chaired the subsequent sessions with Prof Nah  through Zoom. Dr Ralf SCHMÄLZLE from Michigan State University and Dr Jacob FISHER from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign offered more inspiring thoughts on media neuroscience topics such as how human brains response to different messages from movies and how media influences attention. 

The conducive academic atmosphere sustained in the afternoon session, which was chaired by Dr ZHEN Shanshan, Assistant Professor from CityU’s Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Dr HU Xiaoqing from The University of Hong Kong and Dr Ray LC, Assistant Professor from CityU’s School of Creative Media, were invited to be the speakers to share their innovative views on cognitive neuroscience, such as the memory editing function of human brains during sleep and the avatar-mediated communication in social VR. More interesting findings about cognitive and media neuroscience were presented on Day 2 of the symposium, Dr Yoona KANG from the University of Pennsylvania shared her experiment results on compassion intervention and mobile-based intervention on health behaviour, while the next speaker Dr Bolton CHAU from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University shared his research project on the brain basis of decision making. 

The last session of the two-day symposium covered sharing on natural language processing and neurolinguistics. Chaired by Dr LI Jixing, Assistant Professor of CityU’s Department of Linguistics and Translation, in this session, Dr CAI Zhenguang from The Chinese University of Hong Kong showcased insightful findings about human-like linguistics capacities in Large Language Models and experiments on ChatGPT.  Riding on the ChatGPT topic, Dr KONG Lingpeng from The University of Hong Kong gave audience more room for discussion on syntactic parsing and machine translation under in-context learning. 

The symposium ended in heated discussion and brought new ideas on the application of neuroscience in fields of media and communication, psychology and linguistics. The academic and professional exchange in interdisciplinary research on neuroscience continued on 17 April 2023, Dr Maria KOZHEVNIKOV, Associate Professor from National University of Singapore, presented a seminar titled “Towards Exceptional Visual Cognition and Creativity”, giving behavioural and neural evidence that dissociation between ventral and dorsal systems exists in individual differences in visual imagery and creativity.

For more upcoming Brain research cluster activities and events, please click here.