Future Conferences

Format Cycle

The Cognitive Science Society plans to host a fully synchronous hybrid conference every 3 years, starting in 2025. In the other years, the conference will be in-person.  The Governing Board, with guidance from the Conference Committee and the Hybridisation Committee, approved this plan after a great deal of discussion, briefly described below:

Rationale:
Since COVID in 2020, the Cognitive Science Society has been discussing how best to run its annual conference. The conference landscape has also been altered by changes in technology, shifting conference norms, visa issues, several major world events, and greater attention to accessibility and the climate crisis. The pandemic allowed the Society to experiment with various types of virtual conference offerings, from being online in 2020 and 2021, to being fully hybrid conference in 2022, and streaming from only the main conference room in 2023.

Throughout this process, we have gotten feedback from our members about their conference experiences, including very positive feedback on our 2022 synchronous hybrid conference in Toronto. We have also examined logistic constraints, our finances and conference budget. While conference expenses have allowed us to break even in the past, our hybrid conference in 2022 and semi-hybrid conference in 2023 resulted in a substantial financial loss for the society.

The three-year cycle will allow us to financially and logistically sustain conferences into the future, while offering a fully hybrid experience on a regular basis.

Location cycle

The three-year location cycle for the annual conference is:

1: Western Europe
2: US or Canada
3: Anywhere else in the world, with a preference for locations that would serve emerging cognitive science communities and that have not previously had a CogSci conference in the vicinity. Possible destinations include Africa, the Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Mexico, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East.