Each year, the cognitive science community at the University of Pennsylvania brings together the best and brightest undergraduate students from around the world to learn about the growing fields of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.
As a participant, you can:
Labs and Tours:
Each of the two weeks of the workshop will be centered around a specific theme in Cognitive Science. This year the weeks will have the following topics:
WEEK 1
Development of Communication Systems: Ontogeny to Phylogeny
How did human language evolve? How and why did human communication change from a simple signaling system to the complex system we see today? How are languages created and learned, and how do languages change from generation to generation? These are some of the core questions that drive communication research at Penn, which spans the fields of anthropology, biology, computer science, neuroscience, linguistics, psychology and philosophy. In Week 1, we will sample these various approaches to these questions. And in doing so, we hope to highlight the fact that these questions share an unexpected common thread; they all involve understanding how complex systems change from state to state over time, be it months, years, centuries or even millennia. Modeling these dynamics mathematically has become an interest in all of these domains. We will ask whether a set of computational tools might be developed to form the basis of a common 'language' among communication researchers generally, facilitating the exchange of ideas across the sub-disciplines of cognitive science.
WEEK 2
Constraining Cognition: Ecologically Adaptive Solutions in Perception, Memory, and Language
Perceptual and cognitive systems are constantly faced with highly ambiguous information, and yet reliably manage to interpret and act on this information correctly. Is this possible because our perceptual and cognitive systems are tuned to the specific world that we evolved and developed in? In week 2, lectures and labs will focus on the statistical properties of the world, how these can in principle be exploited by information processing systems, and whether and how our brains exploit them. Specific topics are likely to include ambiguity resolution and cue combination in vision, extraction of features from environmental signals, how cognitive control mechanisms allow us to adapt flexibly to changing properties of the environment, and the neural basis of biological information processing.
Participating CCN and IRCS faculty are expected to include:
Geoff Aguirre,
Benjamin Backus,
Matthew Botvinick,
David Brainard,
Thore Bergman,
Anjan Chatterjee,
H. Branch Coslett,
Delphine Dahan,
Russell Epstein,
Martha Farah,
Lila Gleitman,
Josh Gold,
Gary Hatfield,
Amishi Jha,
Aravind Joshi,
Anthony Kroch,
Robert Kurzban,
Mark Liberman,
Richard Murray,
Fernando Pereira,
Don Ringe,
Lawrence Saul,
Beatrice Santorini,
Robert Seyfarth,
Sharon Thompson-Schill,
Daniel Swingley,
John Trueswell,
and David White.
You should apply if:
Course experience with cognitive science is desired, but not required.
Minority students are strongly encouraged to apply.
Questions?
Please see the FAQ page or you can send e-mail to
ircsusw@linc.cis.upenn.edu
Online Application
To apply, please complete our online application form.
Mailing address for workshop correspondence:
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
Attn: Summer Workshop
Suite 400A, 3401 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228
USA
Workshop Sponsors: