On April 7–8, the Departments of Philosophy and Psychology and the Neuroscience program hosted an interdisciplinary conference on “New Directions in Social Cognition Research.” 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.
The keynote speakers were Daniel J. Povinelli (professor of biology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and Josef Perner (professor of psychology and member of the Center for Neurocognitive Research, University of Salzburg). Invited speakers were 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).
