Symposia

Governing Board symposium:

Cognitive Science and the Learning Sciences

The focus of the symposium is on real world implementations of
educational innovations based on cognitive and learning science
principles and research. These real world implementations can be in
physical classrooms, on-line courses, informal educational settings,
as well as other learning environments. The innovations can include
new ways of conceptualizing and presenting a domain, computer-based
multimedia learning tools, and other innovations. The common thread
though is that these innovations are beyond lab-testing and are guided
by principles and research from the cognitive and learning sciences.

The governing board symposium will bring to the conference educational
innovation found in different parts of the world (US, Asia, Europe)
from distinguished researchers representing a variety of theoretical
orientations and focusing on different aspects of the learning process
(e.g., cognitive, social, emotional/motivational).

Organizers: Richard Catrambone and Stella Vosniadou
Speakers:
Naomi Miyake
Roy Pea
Reinhart Pekrun
Kurt VanLehn

Invited symposia

Thirty years of Marr's Vision: Levels of Analysis in Cognitive Science

Thirty years after Marr's landmark posthumous book, Vision, the
argument for which he is most cited remains the distinction between
computational, algorithmic and representational, and the
implementation levels. In the interim, many reformulations of this
basic distinction have been proposed, but is it still relevant? This
symposium will discuss whether there is still a place for the
algorithmic and representational level, with its cognitive-level
concepts, given the rise in reductionist neuroscience from below and
Bayesian analysis from above.

Speakers:
Chris Eliasmith
Tom Griffiths
Valerie Hardcastle
Brad Love
Discussant: Bill Bechtel

Robotics and Emotion

Robotics studies have developed at many places across the globe and explored many different approaches. Among others, Japan has been one of the leading countries promoting robotics studies, breaking new ground with establishing Human Robot Interaction as an international society and leading the world with very human like Geminoids (cf. YouTube video). In the 1940-s, Masanao Toda, a founder of cognitive science in Japan, proposed a visionary robotic system to explore and understand the function of emotion as a trigger of cognitive mechanisms for survival. For example, when a human was exploring in the ancient wilderness, fear must have worked as a switch between the exploratory mode and the find-an-escape mode to promote survival. The thought-experimental robot, the Fungus Eater, seeded some of the early AI research when it was introduced to psychologists in the U.S. and the Netherlands. In this symposium, we will look to a few of the starting points of robotics research, like that of Toda-s, and explore how this has expanded to include AI and robotics researchers in Europe, particularly with emphasis on embodiment and emotion, and how this has influenced new developments of robotics research in Japan. Our aim is to explore how to extend our understandings of human cognition through the eye of robotics, allowing us to reflect upon ourselves more directly than carefully scripted experiments.

Chair: Naomi Miyake
Speakers:
Yuichiro Anzai
Rolf Pfeifer
Hiroshi Ishiguro