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REPORT
Report about the 35th annual meeting of the cognitive sciencesociety
Yulia Sandamirskaya
� Marta Olivetti Belardinelli and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
The 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
(CogSci 2013) was hosted by the Humboldt University of
Berlin and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain from July
31 to August 3, 2013. The conference organizers formed a
highly interdisciplinary team, including a philosopher
Michael Pauen (HU Berlin, Germany), cognitive psychol-
ogists Markus Knauff (Universitat Giessen, Germany), and
Natalie Sebanz (Central European University, Hungary), as
well as a computer scientist Ipke Wachsmuth (Universitat
Bielefeld, Germany), who ensured a high-quality event
attracting scientists from every corner of the field. Three of
the organizers are the members of the German Society for
Cognitive Science (GK), which supported the conference
along with the German Science Foundation (DFG), Arti-
ficial Intelligence Journal, EuCog network, The Robert
Glushko and Pamela Samuelson foundation, and the pub-
lisher Willey Blackwell.
The meeting was overwhelming in its scope and scale.
Virtually, all aspects of human and animal cognition, as
well as a plethora of methods to investigate cognitive
phenomena were covered in up to eleven parallel tracks of
the conference: from perception to social cognition and
from neurocognitive modeling to robotics.
There were a few remarkable trends at the CogSci 2013.
The most significant of them—a paradigm shift toward
more grounded approaches to cognition—could be seen in
several sessions, workshops, and tutorials of the conference
and was glorified by this year’s Rumelhart Prize. The Prize
was received by Indiana University Professor Linda Smith,
who is one of the pioneers of the dynamic, mechanistic,
and process-oriented view on cognition. In her ingenious
experiments, Prof. Smith demonstrates how the environ-
ment, actively explored by infants and toddlers, reveals
quite different grounds for the development of cognition
than a disembodied approach would suggest. The Heineken
Prize winner, John Duncan from the University of Cam-
bridge, also talked to this trend in his keynote lecture, ‘‘A
core brain system in assembly of cognitive episodes,’’
which draw a link between cognition and neural processes.
Another theme, which went as a red thread through the
conference, was social cognition, as well as cooperation
and joint action. Michael E. Bratman (Stanford Univerisi-
ty) touched on this topic in his keynote talk on shared
agency, and Cynthia Breazeal (the Media Lab of MIT)
emphasized the social component in human–robot inter-
action. The invited speaker Elisabeth Spelke (Harvard)
presented her work in support of the social origins of
cognition.
Apart from these invited talks, presented by the world
experts in the field, five invited symposia were organized,
providing a forum for discussions on various topics, such
as the joint action, interaction between language and ges-
ture, new frameworks of rationality, linguistic composi-
tionality, as well as word and language learning (Rumelhart
Prize symposium).
In the tutorials of the conference, a whole spectrum of
mathematical tools that facilitate cognitive modeling was
presented, including the quantum probability theory, hid-
den Markov modeling, and the complex network analysis.
Moreover, the conference attendees could learn how large-
scale cognitive architectures may be realized and verified
in a functional brain simulation Spaun, or within the
framework of dynamic neural fields. Such modern tools to
test cognitive models like robots or virtual humans were
also presented in the CogSci 2013 tutorials.
Y. Sandamirskaya (&)
Institut fur Neuroinformatik, Ruhr-Univeristat Bochum,
Bochum, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
123
Cogn Process (2013) 14:443–444
DOI 10.1007/s10339-013-0579-8
Nine workshops addressed specific open questions in
cognitive science, such as the mental model ascription by
language-enabled intelligent agents, integrative models of
human cognition, joint attention in human interaction and
embodied approaches to interpersonal coordination, design
of diagrammatic cognition, and new types of web-based
experimentation, as well as bridging the gap between
computational and cognitive approaches to reference.
Finally, the conference was flooded with the presenta-
tions of empirical results, which form the basis for new
theories, the ground for philosophical discussions, the
ground truth for models, and inspiration for technical
implementations. In more than 680 posters and about 280
talks practically, all aspects and subfields of cognitive
science found their place for the presentation and discus-
sion at the CogSci 2013. The conference has attracted
1,320 participants from Europe, Asia, Australia, and
America and marked another milestone in the strive to
understand the wonder of the human mind, as well to get
inspiration for new, cognitive, technology.
444 Cogn Process (2013) 14:443–444
123