Jörg Cassens, Rebekah Wegener, Lorenz Habenicht, and Julian Blohm discuss the dialogic form of explanations. Explanations are a long established research topic in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from philosophy (van Fraassen, 1980; Achinstein, 1983) over the cognitive sciences and psychology (Lalljee et al., 1983; Keil and Wilson, 2000; Lombrozo, 2006) to computer science in general and artificial intelligence in particular (Schank, 1986; Leake, 1992; Leake (1995); Sørmo et al., 2005). However, while there is compelling research supporting the value, structure and function of explanation, as Edwards et al. (2019) argue, “accounts of explanation typically define explanation (the product) rather than explaining (the process)”. By contrast, we aim at an understanding of explanation as a functional variety of language behaviour that treats explanations as being:



Explanation in Human Thinking

Counterfactual explanations in explainable AI

technical paper

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

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CogSci 2021

The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

**Session Chair: **Molly Quinn 
**Technical Session Chair: **Joao Goncalves 
**Session Description: ** Jörg Cassens,Rebekah Wegener, Lorenz Habenicht, and Julian Blohm discuss the dialogic form of explanations. Explanations are a long established research topic in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from philosophy (van Fraassen, 1980; Achinstein, 1983) over the cognitive sciences and psychology (Lalljee et al.,
1983; Keil and Wilson, 2000; Lombrozo, 2006) to computer science in general and artificial intelligence in particular (Schank, 1986; Leake, 1992;  Leake (1995); Sørmo et al., 2005). However, while there is compelling research supporting the value, structure and function of explanation, as Edwards et al. (2019) argue, “accounts of explanation typically define explanation (the product) rather than explaining (the process)”. By contrast, we aim at an understanding of explanation as a functional variety of language behaviour that treats explanations as being:

1. Contextualised,  which itself  is  comprised of: 
   a) Context   Awareness (knowing   the   situation the system  is  in) 
  b)  Context Sensitivity  (acting according tosuch situation) 
2. Construed by user interest: 
 a) Multimodal 
 b)Dialogic 


In this  talk,  we will  focus  on the  latter  two aspects,  the dialogic  form of  explanations  and its representation  in different modalities (and codalities).  We will report on our recent  empirical  work 
where  we  have been  looking  at explanatory situations, firstly the differences between human to human explanations and machine to human explanations (using  of-the-shelf  speech  dialogue  systems)  and 
secondly multimodal human to human explanations.


Click <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1krAJanPq8wmzKaahQbA43irXJbR5ZW9P/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">here</a> for the full symposium description

Greta Warren

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Explanation in Human Thinking

Counterfactual explanations in explainable AI

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