Over the last decade, cognitive science and allied fields have been criticized for being excessively “WEIRD,” i.e., overly reliant on participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. The lack of diversity among research participants is now widely acknowledged, but it’s a rather superficial problem, symptomatic of other more fundamental ones. This poster outlines what we see as four overlapping problems. Cognitive science is WEIRD not only in terms of who makes up its participant pool, but also in terms of its theoretical commitments (e.g., individualism and universalism), methodological assumptions (e.g., measurement and analysis methods), and institutional structures (e.g., funding and publishing). Merely solving the problem of WEIRD participants by sampling more widely is insufficient to address cognitive science’s more fundamental WEIRD theoretical, methodological and institutional problems. Coming to terms with this is necessary if we wish to make cognitive science relevant for all humanity.

How WEIRD is Cognitive Science?

A common claim by advocates of embodied, dynamical approaches is that action and perception are “coupled.” On the face of it, this claim may not seem controversial, after all many researchers working in mainstream computationalist neuroscientific approaches also talk about the “coupling” of perception and action. Our goal here is to clarify the relation between these claims of perception-action coupling stemming from dynamical and from computational perspectives. Examining the empirical evidence that computationalists and dynamicists invoke to support their claims we conclude that, despite using similar terminology, they mean entirely different and incompatible things. Still, we propose that both approaches can, at least to some extent, accommodate the evidence invoked by the other. This suggests that the evidence should not, on its own, be used to argue in favor of one approach against the other, and that the disagreement is of a philosophical nature rather than an empirical one.

Perception-Action Coupling and the Dynamicist/Computationalist Divide

The usual approach to studying affordances is in controlled laboratory situations. While recognizing the value of controlled experimentation, I argue for the benefits of additionally considering affordances “in the wild,” i.e., in the context of real-world activity. As an example, I describe ethnographic observation about the introduction of cellphones in rural Uganda in the early 2000s, highlighting the unexpected, innovative uses that emerged in that unique context. This case, I suggest, illustrates the constitutive role of material, sociocultural constraints in the perception and realization of affordances which often go unacknowledged in experimental laboratory research. Theoretically, the case raises questions about the definition of affordances, in particular how narrowly or broadly to conceptualize their spatiotemporal dimensionality. And methodologically, it poses the question of how anthropology can contribute to embodied cognitive science and, more broadly, how experimental and observational approaches can help one another to further our understanding of psychological phenomena.

Affordances in the wild: Anthropological Contributions to Embodied Cognitive Science

Poster Session 3 

poster

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

Join us!

<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
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#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
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CogSci 2023

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Poster Session 1


**For a full list of posters in this session, click the See All link on the right side of the page.**

Poster Session 1 -  B: Animal Cognition and Communication

### Looking for Cogsci 2023? Please [click here](https://underline.io/events/405/reception) to switch to 2023 edition.


**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.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

**Your Program Chairs,**
![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/99984908caba5e6453e5fc5ba34f3507.jpg)

**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


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.

Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira

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SHORT BIO

Presentations

How WEIRD is Cognitive Science?

Perception-Action Coupling and the Dynamicist/Computationalist Divide

Affordances in the wild: Anthropological Contributions to Embodied Cognitive Science

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