Aug 04 2007
CogSci07 Day 4
Day 4
The Immediate Interactive Behavior symposium this afternoon was quite interesting. It is something of an amalgam, of 3 separate movements in cognition. Embodied and embedded cognition, dynamical systems and dynamics of cognition, and the Cognition in the Wild notions of Edwin Hutchins where we analyze cognition as an interactive dynamical system between environment and person, and especially how we offload our cognitive processes and reduce the cognitive load into our environments by structuring our environments in such a way to facilitate this. This is stuff I am very familiar with, and am quite happy to see it all being combined together into one view. Really this kind of combined view is becoming much more popular. I can name a half-dozen books, like Andy Clark’s Being There, or Rolf Pfeifer’s Understanding Intelligence of which this combination is central to the thesis of how real biological cognitive performance functions.
For the most part loved the seminar on Complex Systems concepts and their application/use in the Cognitive Sciences. This is basically the conceptual perspective I have had, at least since the beginning of my graduate student days. And I was quite surprised, and glad, to actually see an explicit seminar on these topics and their application to Cognitive Science. (This was a first for me at a CogSci confernce, and since I have been going for the last 5-6 years, probably the first time ever for the conference). Unfortunately there were some less interesting subjects (to me), especially some of the presenters were interested in the teaching and learning of complex systems concepts, rather than their application to models of cognition. But besides that it was a very good session.
We had dinner with Xiaowei Zhao and his wife Shuxia the night before. Here is a picture of all of us from their camera. Zhao is a Postdoc with Ping Li at the University of Richmond and their paper won the Best Computational Modeling prize in the language category this year for the conference.
Hi Derek,
Your blog is excellent! I accidentally found it when I googled my name on the internet. It is amazing that you took so many notes on the conference, and we enjoyed to have dinner with you and Shulan!
I will add a link of you blog on my Webpage.
By the way, my website address is www.richmond.edu/~xzhao2 ; without swan.
Xiaowei