We welcome paper proposals for the 4th iCog conference to be held at the University of Oxford, on the 17th and 18th of June, 2017. The conference will explore 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.
- Confirmed speakers include:
- Riika Mottonen (Oxford, Psychology)
- Shannon Spaulding (Oklahoma State, Philosophy)
- Stephen Butterfill (University of Warwick, Philosophy)
- Tao Gao (MIT, Psychology)
We are particularly (but not exclusively) interested in papers that consider the following questions:
- What properties and happenings (if any) do perceptual processes track that are relevant to our understanding of action and social proficiency more generally?
- How do perceptual processes track these properties and happenings?
- Are these properties and happenings tracked by modality specific systems, or are they tracked by special purpose perceptual mechanisms of their own (e.g. Liberman, 1967)/ cross-modal objects of perception?
- Are there other ways in which perceptual processes make an interesting contribution to our capacity to track and make sense of observed action? For instance, by parsing action (e.g. Baird and Baldwin, 2001).
- Do perceptual (or perception-like—e.g. Carey, 2009) mechanisms of this sort play a special role in cognitive development?
- How do these processes relate to theory of mind abilities (e.g. Simmons et al., 2009)?
- Are traditional accounts of action understanding threatened by the existence of perceptual processes of the above sort?
- Can we draw a line between perceptual and post-perceptual contributions to action tracking and action understanding? Should we? And, if so, how? (see Gao and Scholl, 2013)
- Does any of this have a bearing on the contents of perceptual experience?
- Conversely, can perceptual phenomenology be used to constrain answers to the above?
We particularly encourage submissions by philosophers and cognitive scientists from underrepresented groups. Papers should be suitable for presentation within 30 minutes, leaving 15 minutes for discussion. Abstracts of no longer than 1000 words should be submitted for blind review by April 20th to iCog4@outlook.com.