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REPORT Report about the 35th annual meeting of the cognitive science society Yulia Sandamirskaya Ó 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 (Universita ¨t Giessen, Germany), and Natalie Sebanz (Central European University, Hungary), as well as a computer scientist Ipke Wachsmuth (Universita ¨t 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 fu ¨r Neuroinformatik, Ruhr-Univerista ¨t Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] 123 Cogn Process (2013) 14:443–444 DOI 10.1007/s10339-013-0579-8

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Page 1: Report about the 35th annual meeting of the cognitive science society

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

Page 2: Report about the 35th annual meeting of the cognitive science society

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