Battle08

Workshop on Enactive approaches to Social Cognition

Aug. 30 – Sep. 1, 2008 (mid-Sat. to mid-Mon.)

Battle, near Hastings, East Sussex, UK

• For details of all the participants click here.
• For information about the workshop program, suggested reading material, directions to venue, etc., please click here.

There is a growing consensus in the cognitive sciences that cognition is best understood as an embodied-embedded dynamical process which spans a systemic whole consisting of an agent’s brain, body and world. This has had significant consequences for modeling cognitive behaviour, but has not yet been addressed much in the modelling of social interactions, which is still strongly influenced by the traditional information transfer paradigm.

Much of recent research in embodied-embedded cognitive science has focused on sensorimotor embodiment, as evidenced by the growing popularity of enactive and embodied approaches to perception, as well as recent work in AI and robotics. We believe that it is time to apply these important insights to the domain of interpersonal interaction, which itself involves a distinct form of sensorimotor coupling.

To facilitate this, the workshop will bring together a small group of researchers from different backgrounds who are currently working towards improving our understanding of social cognition by adopting an enactive perspective. Special effort will be made to ensure that the interdisciplinarity of the workshop will result in a fruitful exchange of skills and methods across the diverse disciplines and a discussion of how they can inform cognitive modeling research. Participants will be invited to the thematic development of the event through a series of online pre-workshop discussions.

The workshop will include 3 invited speakers (Charles Lenay, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, University of Oregon, and Evan Thompson, University of Toronto) and a series of activities and focused discussions.

The workshop will take place in PowderMills Hotel, a beautiful country house hotel in the East Sussex countryside of the UK. The costs of attending the workshop for each participant will be £310 (which includes accommodation for 2 nights at the venue, meals, conference facilities, etc.).

This is an official euCognition event. Members who attend are eligible to claim their travel and subsistence costs subject to the normal guidelines. Non-members are also welcome to attend but their travel and subsistence costs will not be covered.

The organisers.

Ezequiel Di Paolo (ezequiel (-AT-) sussex.ac.uk)

Steve Torrance (s.torrance (-AT-) mdx.ac.uk)

Hanne De Jaegher (H.De.Jaegher (-AT-) uni-heidelberg.de)

Tom Froese (T.Froese (-AT-) gmail.com

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