Report about the 35th annual meeting of the cognitive science society

Abstract

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 psychologists 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), Artificial Intelligence Journal, EuCog network, The Robert Glushko and Pamela Samuelson foundation, and the publisher 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 environment, 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 Cambridge, 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 Univerisity) 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 interaction. 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 gesture, new frameworks of rationality, linguistic compositionality, 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, hidden Markov modeling, and the complex network analysis. Moreover, the conference attendees could learn how largescale 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: sandayci@neuroinformatik.rub.de