CALL FOR PAPERS – Adaptive Behavior Special issue on “Post-cognitivist approaches to perceptual learning”

The classical cognitivist theory in cognitive science depicts perception as the result of information processing of sense data, which is transformed into a representation of the original information to be useful for the human mind. In the same vein, perceptual learning has been understood as an enrichment of sensations by representational mechanisms. In this view, the improvement in performance must be understood as the effect of a sophistication of computational algorithms entailing a better interpretation of sensory stimuli.

At the end of the 20th century, criticism against the cognitivist framework and its ideas of perception, cognition, and representation started to arise. Some of these arguments crystallized in alternative theories of cognition that offers an innovative way to understand perception and, consequently, perceptual learning.

The aim of this special issue is to document the theories and research that highlight a “4E cognition” approach to perceptual learning. The issue is focused on contributions from the current panorama of post-cognitivism with an emphasis on theories from the ecological, enactive and sensorimotor accounts.

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CALL FOR PAPERS – Adaptive Behavior Special issue: “Spotlight on 4E Cognition research in Colombia”

The last couple of decades in cognitive science have seen an increasing interest in the philosophical and scientific study of embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition – so-called “4E cognition.” By now theories of 4E cognition have matured and a lot of evidence has been collected, which consequently has reshaped our understanding of the relationship between an agent’s brain, body, and its material and sociocultural world. Despite their differences in emphasis, the various strands of 4E cognition research are united in proposing that an agent’s cognitive activity is bodily mediated, especially by the context-sensitive deployment of sensorimotor capacities.

While these interdisciplinary approaches have largely been developed in Europe, the United States, and Australia, other regions have also been influenced by this growing movement and have started to advance their own original contributions. The aim of this special issue is, therefore, to put a spotlight on 4E cognition research from one such region, Colombia. It intends to do so in two respects: first, to explore the current state and breadth of the field in Colombia; second, to critically examine questions and problems elicited by this Colombian research, focusing on open challenges, with the aim to articulate more precise arguments for and against key claims advanced by 4E cognition research.

The 15th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2018)

FROM ANIMALS TO ANIMATS 15
The 15th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2018)
14-17 August 2018, Frankfurt, Germany

* Keynote speakers *

Auke Jan Ijspeert, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland
Jan Peters, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany
Koh Hosoda, Osaka University, Japan
Tom Froese, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico

EON Workshop

Tom Froese and Jorge Campos Bravo will participate in the following workshop at the end of their stay Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo this summer.

EON Workshop: Sensors, Motors and Behaviour at the Origin of Life

EON will hold an international workshop at ELSI on July 26-28, 2017.

Organizers: Matthew Egbert ¹  ,   Martin Hanczyc ^2
1 Lecturer, University of Auckland, NZ                    
² Principal Investigator, Centre for Integrative Biology, University of Trento, Italy

Venue: ELSI Hall in ELSI-1 bldg., Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.

Title: Sensors, Motors and Behaviour at the Origin of Life

More information can be found on the EON workshop website.