Conference: New Directions in Social Cognition Research

27 February 2018 Comments Off on Conference: New Directions in Social Cognition Research

Hosted by the Departments of Philosophy and Psychology and the Neuroscience program, a conference on “New Directions in Social Cognition Research” will be held on April 7 and 8.

Social cognition is an expanding field of study that has come to include researchers from the fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and robotics. It focuses on describing and explaining how human, nonhuman, and artificial systems understand sociality.

While theoretical debates in philosophy consider issues of origins and ontology, in psychology, qualitative and quantitative methods are used to discover developmental, cross-cultural and comparative patterns in different sorts of social performances, and neuroscience considers any neurologically relevant contributions to such abilities. Finally, roboticists have begun to explore how to create social agents capable of robust forms of human interaction. This interdisciplinary conference will explore some of the new ideas in the study of social cognition.

Attendance is free for all graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, independent researchers and faculty, but registration is required.

Submissions are now being accepted for poster presentations; the deadline for this is March 5. Poster proposals should be between 500 and 1,000 words and submitted as a PDF file. To submit a proposal, please go to http://www.phil.bilkent.edu.tr/.

The keynote speakers will be Daniel J. Povinelli (professor of biology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and Josef Perner (professor of psychology and member of the Centre for Neurocognitive Research, University of Salzburg).

Invited speakers are: Jedediah W.P. Allen (assistant professor of psychology and co-director of the BIL-GE developmental lab, Bilkent University); Kristin Andrews (York Research Chair in Animal Minds and associate professor of philosophy, York University, Toronto); Marco Fenici (research fellow, Bilkent University); Bahar Köymen (lecturer, University of Manchester); and Raymond Mar (associate professor, York University).