embodied cognition

Workshop in Evolution and the Embodied Mind: The biological roots of 4E Cognition

City: Donostia-San Sebastián (Spain).

Date: 12, 13 & 14 July, 2019.

Venue: Ignacio María Barriola Building (Elhuyar Square, 1), University of the Basque Country.

This workshop aims to gather researchers in Evolution and 4E Cognition in order to evaluate which are the complementarities and tensions between these two approaches. The topics of the workshop will include (although will not be restricted to) the following ones:

  1. Minimal cognition from a 4E perspective
  2.  Embodied and situated approaches to the evolution of cognition
  3.  The role of sociality in cognitive evolution from a 4E perspective

Unfortunately, there is no extra place for speakers, but do not hesitate to contact them for joining as attendants. There will be a great deal of discussion and debate, and it will be great to have an audience willing to engage into these topics. If you plan to go, please, confirm your assistance by emailing them in the contact section of the website (provided below). The workshop is organized by Manuel Heras-Escribano and Ezequiel Di Paolo (IAS Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society, EHU-UPV) and generously funded by the BBVA Foundation through the 2018 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators entitled “La filosofía de las affordances: los orígenes ecológicos, evolutivos y sociales de la cognición [AFFORDEVOCOG]”

For more information, visit: https://evolutionandtheembodiedmind.wordpress.com/

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10th Anniversary of the Laboratorio de Robótica Cognitiva, UAEM

CYCLE OF CONFERENCES

The Laboratorio de Robótica Cognitiva of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, celebrates its 10th Anniversaty with a cycle of conferences about Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Sciences.
Consult the entire program at: www.roboticacognitiva.mx/programa

21-22 February 2019
Auditorio del CIDC-UAEM
Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos
Av. Universidad 1001. Col. Chamilpa
Cuernavaca, Morelos. C. P. 62209– M E X I C O

Register

www.roboticacognitiva.mx/registro

Contact & More Information

www.cidc.uaem.mx
cinc.uaem.mx/~bruno/
facebook.com/LabRobCog/

Body of Knowledge: Art and Embodied Cognition conference: CFP

Body of Knowledge: Art and Embodied Cognition 27-29 June 2019, hosted by Deakin University – Melbourne, Australia

BoK2019 will continue to pursue the goals initiated at BoK2016, organized and directed by Simon Penny, bringing together interdisciplinary researcher- practitioners including cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, philosophers of mind, physiologists, psychologists, anthropologists, computer scientists, artists and designers to explore a range of emerging theories of cognition including enactive approaches, embodied and social cognition. The aim of BoK2019 is to foster conversations that increase the potential for knowledge transfer and celebrate diverse forms of embodied expertise. Therefore, the conference thematics will be expanded to emphasize cultures of practice and communities of practitioners that offer perspectives on inclusion, diversity/neurodiversity and disability. To this end, BoK2019 will foreground social cognition, enabling the productive tensions between neuroscience and enactive theories of cognition to be drawn out for analysis. (more…)

ENSO Seminar Series

Naturally Evolving Minds: Transformation and Continuity

Glenda Satne

University of Wollongong
Dec. 13, 2018, 7 p.m. UTC // Dec. 13, 2018, 1 p.m. in America/Mexico_City

According to Enactivism, cognition is enactive, embodied and embedded: an interactional engagement with-in the world on the part of situated agents. Enactivism rejects the idea that basic forms of cognition involve representing worldly objects and facts. Radical Enactivism (REC) in its turn, denies that cognition must always and everywhere involve content, but concedes that sometimes cognition is content-involving. Thus, REC is committed to providing a story about the progression from basic forms of cognition to content-involving ones and an account of the relationship between them. In this talk, I examine two important challenges that REC faces. First, the “continuity problem” (Menary 2015, Clowes and Mendonça 2015), i.e. whether REC is committed to a “saltationist view” in describing the progression from non-human forms of cognition to human specific ones, a view that is incompatible with evolutionary continuity. Second, the “transformation challenge” (Kern & Moll 2017), i.e. the charge that content-involving forms of cognition are transformative and thus transform the nature of basic forms of cognition penetrating them with content, leaving no room for basic non-contentful forms of cognition for transformed minds.

In discussing such challenges, evolutionary, psychological and philosophical aspects of transformation and continuity are considered. The motivations that each of these theoretical domains provide for thinking that human specific forms of cognition are alike/different from non-human ones are discussed. The outcome of such considerations is that continuity and transformation are not all-or-nothing phenomena, especially when not considered under the light of philosophical necessity arguments. This leaves room for transformation, evolution, and interaction between basic and non-basic forms of cognition but it also comes at a cost, i.e. denying the credo that cognition is by necessity a uniform phenomenon.

Link for the talk: http://ensoseminars.com/presentations/forthcoming

5E Cognition: Virtual Embodiment and Artificial Intelligence

The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP) in collaboration with University of Cincinnati is hosting a workshop exploring topics related to Enactive and Ecological accounts of Embodied Cognition, Comparative Chinese and Japanese Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence. The workshop will be held at the University of Tokyo campus on December 6th and 7th 2018.

5E Cognition refers to the coalition of enactive, extended, embedded, ecological, and embodied theories of cognition and action. The general scope of the workshop is to discuss the implications of Artificial Intelligence, virtual environments, and technological artifacts through the interdisciplinary lens of 5E Cognition. They plan to explore the ways in which human action, perception, and cognition may be profoundly changed by our increasingly digital world. How technology expands, augments, and inhibits the human capacity for ethical and social practice is of particular interest.

(more…)

21st ENSO Seminar: TONY CHEMERO. Radical Embodiment and Real Cognition

The 21st ENSO Seminar will be presented by Tony Chemero!

Next week, Thursday 8th March @ 3pm UTC, Tony will present on Radical Embodiment and Real Cognition. The details of the talk, including the time in your own timezone, can be found on the ENSO webpage.

Abstract

A persistent criticism of radical embodied cognitive science is that it will be impossible to explain “real cognition” without invoking mental representations. This talk will provide an account of explicit, real-time thinking of the kind we engage in when we imagine counter-factual situations, remember the past, and plan for the future. We will first present a very general non-representational account of explicit thinking, based on pragmatist philosophy of science. Then we will present a more detailed instantiation of this general account drawing on nonlinear dynamics and ecological psychology. This talk is based on a paper co-authored with Gui Sanches de Oliveira and Vicente Raja.

 

 

Sensitivity to social contingency in adults with high-functioning autism

As part of his doctoral research, Leonardo Zapata-Fonseca coordinated this analysis of embodied social interaction. Great team effort!

Sensitivity to Social Contingency in Adults with High-Functioning Autism during Computer-Mediated Embodied Interaction

Leonardo Zapata-Fonseca, Tom Froese, Leonhard Schilbach, Kai Vogeley, and Bert Timmermans

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the emerging “second-person approach” to social cognition a more promising framework for studying ASD than classical approaches focusing on mindreading capacities in detached, observer-based arrangements. According to the second-person approach, embodied, perceptual, and embedded or interactive capabilities are also required for understanding others, and these are hypothesized to be compromised in ASD. We therefore recorded the dynamics of real-time sensorimotor interaction in pairs of control participants and participants with High-Functioning Autism (HFA), using the minimalistic human-computer interface paradigm known as “perceptual crossing” (PC). We investigated whether HFA is associated with impaired detection of social contingency, i.e., a reduced sensitivity to the other’s responsiveness to one’s own behavior. Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that, at least under the conditions of this highly simplified, computer-mediated, embodied form of social interaction, people with HFA perform equally well as controls. This finding supports the increasing use of virtual reality interfaces for helping people with ASD to better compensate for their social disabilities. Further dynamical analyses are necessary for a better understanding of the mechanisms that are leading to the somewhat surprising results here obtained.

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Poster presentations at the C3

On June 8 members if our group participated in an event at the Centre for the Sciences of Complexity (C3) called: “C3: Un Centro Transversal para la UNAM”.

We created a number of posters about our current work in progress:

CFP: DFG Priority Programme “The Active Self”

Call for Proposals No. 24, 18 May 2017

Priority Programme „The Active Self“ (SPP 2134)

The Senate of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) has established a new Priority Programme entitled “The Active Self” (SPP 2134). The programme is designed to run for six years. The present call invites proposals for the first three-year funding period.

The Priority Programme brings together cognitive and behavioural scientists from various disciplines, including psychology and robotics, to study the sensorimotor grounding of the human minimal self – a concept that relates to a person’s phenomenal experience in the here and now and to the question of how we perceive ourselves to be in a particular situation. While this experience is likely to be dominated by information delivered by the senses, i.e., by self-perception in a literal, immediate sense, humans also have knowledge about themselves, amassed over years, and a sense of understanding how their self relates to others.

The relatively recent increasing interest in the self is fueled by important methodological improvements, such as the availability of virtual-reality techniques and affordable robots with humanoid characteristics, and the development of noninvasive methods to study cognition in infants, but also by converging lines of theoretical thinking related to ideomotor processes on the one hand and embodied cognition on the other. The programme will seek to unravel the degree to which our self-representation is plastic and sensitive to immediate experience, to which degree it is constrained by past experience, how it integrates experiences of agency and action-ownership, how it affects other cognitive processes, and to what degree self-representation can be established in artificial agents.