Conferences and Workshops

iCog holds a conference every year or so, and occasional topical workshops.

iCog 5: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Higher Cognitive Function

21–22 February 2019
University of Reading

Invited speakers:

Full programme and abstracts (PDF, 1.2MB) | Conference website

We are grateful for the support of the University of Reading’s Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN), the Mind Association, the Guarantors of Brain, the Analysis Trust, and the Aristotelian Society.

iCog 4: Action Perception

17–18 June 2017
Radcliffe Humanities Building, University of Oxford

The conference explored the role that perceptual processes play in our capacity to track and make sense of observed actions by bringing together researchers working on this topic from across the cognitive sciences.

Speakers:

Programme

iCog 3: Sense and Space

17-19 February 2016
Senate House, University of London

Invited speakers:

Spatial perception is ubiquitous in both human and animal lives. It is relatively plain that vision, audition and touch are spatial senses, but the cases of olfaction and gustation are less clear. But even in those clear cases, it is arguable that different senses register space and spatial properties in different ways. For example, historically it has been argued that vision is intrinsically two-dimensional and has to gain their three-dimensionality from touch (Berkeley 1709); an even more extremely view has it that touch as such lacks three-dimensionality (Hume 1739, Diderot 1749). Nowadays researchers are more equipped to investigate these as well as other related questions empirically, but so far many of those questions remain wide open. This conference seeks to gain a deeper understanding of spatial perception in humans and other animals.

Programme | Abstracts

We are grateful for the support of the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London, University College London, the Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, the Analysis Trust,  the Aristotelian Society, and the Mind Association.

iCog 2: Perspectives on Learning

15-16 October 2014
Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh

The second annual iCog conference focused on the theme of learning in cognitive science. Learning, broadly construed, provides a point of intersection between the disciplines that comprise cognitive science. We take these disciplines to include, but not be limited to, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science and anthropology. iCog drew together different perspectives on the theme of learning in order to facilitate co-operation between the disciplines and to develop new approaches to old problems.

Conference talks included the topics of visual learning in insects, language acquisition through social cues, and adaptive learning. In addition to talks by key speakers and early career researchers, there were also poster presentations. Thanks to everyone who joined the conference!

Programme

See below for more information on talks.

Invited Speakers

Jan Derry, Inferentialism, pedagogy, and knowledge (Institute of Education, London)

Rosie Flewitt, A broader view of learning from multimodal ethnography (Institute of Education, London)

Andy Philippides, Visual learning in insects: a case study in synthetic neuroethology (Computational Neuroethology, University of Sussex)

Szu-Han Wang, Keep the adaptive learning and lose the maladaptive one (Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems, University of Edinburgh)

Jean-Marc Dewaele,  Emotions in Multiple Languages (Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck)

Alex Doumas, Learning structured representations from scratch: An overview of the DORa project (Psychology, University of Edinburgh)

Accepted Speakers

Richard Stöckle-Schobel, On the evidence for pre-linguistic concept learning.

James Kusch and Dror Abend David, Why Study a Foreign Language? Motivation, Pedagogy and Translation Theory in Foreign/Second Language Acquisition.

Samantha Austen, Revealing conceptual transfer in adult second language acquisition: a cognitive approach

Charlotte Field, Melissa Allen and Charlie Lewis, Language acquisition from social cues, associative cues and conflicting cues in typically and atypically developing children

Vicente Raja Galian, Perceptual Learning and Ecological Augmented Reality (PLEAR)

Jessica Diaz and Marios Philiastides, The Nature and Neural Locus of Perceptual Learning

Anjuli Manrique, Literacy, Anthropology and Brain Imaging

Andrew Manches and Mihaela Dragomir, Gesture as a window into how physical interaction shapes young children’s numerical development

Accepted Posters

Katherine Livins, Michael Spivey and Leonidas Doumas, Varying Variation: The effects of within- versus across-dimension difference on relational category learning

Sam Clarke, Can Molyneux’s Question be answered empirically?

Lauren Ware, Emotion, learning, and collective decision-making

Lucia Castillo, Factors that influence the establishment of communicative conventions: A maze game study

Mark Atkinson, Simon Kirby, and Kenny Smith, Sociocultural determination of linguistic structure: input variability and morphological complexity

We are grateful for the support of the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, Eidyn (The Edinburgh Centre for Epistemology, Mind, and Normativity), the Scots Philosophical Association, the Aristotelian Society, and the Mind Association.

Turn-taking workshop

Turn-taking in conversation: a multi-disciplinary approach 

Date: 
9 July 2014, 9:30am–3:00pm

Venue:
Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield 

Speakers:
Dr Gareth Walker, English Language and Linguistics, University of Sheffield
Prof Thomas Hain, Computer Science, University of Sheffield

Participants:
Workshop participants came from a wide range of academic backgrounds and departments.

Workshop summary:
As the most natural way of interacting, conversation is at the core of all our daily encounters. Turn-taking is the mechanism that regulates conversation, and as such, it is important within cognitive research and in a vast array of other disciplines. As a basic social action, turn-taking is of great interest to social scientists. 

Psycholinguists investigate our capacity to monitor talk as it evolves in real time, and predict when a speaker will come to the end of a turn. Interactional linguists study how language is used as a tool for taking turns in conversation. Such research has diverse applications, including two that are the particular focus of current work at Sheffield, in healthcare practice and in computational speech processing.

This workshop aims to discuss recent perspectives on turn-taking in conversation and its applications. We invite participation from those interested in conversation research across all disciplines. The emphasis of the workshop is on discussion and the exchange of research experience between participants. 

Two invited talks will lead into a group exercise in analysis of real conversational data, and we will conclude with a panel discussion. In this way we aim to share research practices from different disciplinary perspectives in view of discovering potential collaborative research opportunities.

Workshop organizers:
Emina Kurtic, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield
Amy Beeston, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield

The iCog committee acknowledges the generous support of the Faculty of Science of the University of Sheffield.

iCog inaugural conference: Interdisciplinarity in Cognitive Science

29 November - 1 December 2013
Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield

Guest speakers: 

Programme | Speaker profiles

The iCog inaugural conference was generously supported by: