The Laboratory for COmputational NEurodynamics and Cognition (CONEC)  began conducting research in the fall of 2007 under the direction of Dr. Sylvain Chartier who is an Associate Professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa, member of the Center for Neural Dynamics and the Visual Cognition Research Group. Its primary research area is in developing models of cognitive processes using artificial neural networks. 

Although it is something most of us do every day without effort, memorizing is in fact an incredibly complex task. For instance, the simple act of storing and retrieving a given perceptual pattern is something a computer cannot do with anything approaching human efficiency and robustness. 

The CONEC aims to better understand how human cognitive system accomplishes the complex task of create (and enhance) representation from patterns as well as recognize, identify, categorize and classify them. In particular, research focuses on an interesting nonlinear dynamics system perspective where time and change are the key variables. Within that perspective, memories are represented as invariant states of the system. 

To understand how the human cognitive system works, we need to develop formal models. Nowadays, no formal models can take into account this variety of behavior without scarifying simplicity and self-consistency. CONEC uses recurrent artificial neural networks that are massively parallel and where the information is distributed among the units. Therefore the main objective is the development of a general bidirectional associative memory that can take into account both supervised and unsupervised learning while being constrained by neuropsychological data. From models development, it is hope that we will have a better understanding on how the brains work.