CFP: Reciprocity and Social Cognition

For more details, please see our website:

The Berlin School of Mind and Brain is pleased to announce the Reciprocity and Social Cognition interdisciplinary symposium, to be held at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain from the 23rd to 25th March, 2015.

Reciprocity is a common feature of much social cognition. It is what separates a case in which two people attend to the same object simultaneously from a case of genuine joint attention; and what separates a case in which two people act in parallel from a case of genuine joint action. However, traditional accounts of the foundations of social cognition have underplayed the existence of reciprocity and treated social cognition as a process that rests on observation and not genuine interaction. We are holding a three-day workshop to come to better understand the notion of reciprocity and to explore how the notion of reciprocity can be used to illuminate debates in adjacent fields of social cognition.

Confirmed keynotes are Richard Moran (Philosophy, Harvard), Julia Fischer (Cognitive Ethology, Göttingen) and Natalie Sebanz (Cognitive Science, CEU Budapest). Other confirmed participants include Elisabeth Pacherie (Philosophy, Institut Jean Nicod), Henrike Moll (Psychology, Southern California), Stephen Butterfill (Philosophy, Warwick) and Isabel Dziobek (Neuroscience, HU Berlin).

The workshop is organised around six related symposia:

(1) Intentional communication,

(2) The neuroscience of dialogue,

(3) Socio-cognitive disorders,

(4) Social exchange: insights from computational neuroscience,

(5) Perspective-taking, and

(6) Joint action.

We welcome submissions for poster presentations on any of the six topics listed above. Submissions from all fields of empirical and theoretical cognitive science are encouraged. In place of poster submissions, philosophers should consider submitting short ‘flash’ talks (of around seven minutes or ten .ppt slides in length). We are looking forward to welcoming you in Berlin!