Description

Sensorimotor approaches predict that social cognition does not primarily result from maintaining and

running complex models of intentions and beliefs of other agents, but rather from patterns and

regularities in the dynamic sensorimotor coupling between them. The school will take stock of

concepts and models that follow this emerging view and illuminate them from the perspectives of

relevant fields like social psychology, social cognitive neuroscience, robotics and philosophy of mind.

Tangible outcomes of the school will be a set of articles on selected aspects of sensorimotor accounts

of social cognition which will be authored by the participants and published in Scholarpedia

(scholarpedia.org).

The school will be the first in a series which is funded and organized by the EU H2020 project

"Socializing sensorimotor contingencies - socSMCs" (socSMCs.eu). This year the school is organized

by the Dept. of Neurophysiology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf

(uke.de/neurophysiology).

The registration fee is 300€ and covers participation in the school, accommodation in a single room,

breakfast, lunch and three dinners. A reduced fee of 200€ is requested from participants willing to

share a double room. Participants will have to cover their own travel expenses.

Content

The five-day school will be structured around the following themes:

• Enactive and embodied views on social cognition

• Non-reductionist, interaction-based approaches to social cognition

• Entrainment vs. emulation and mindreading

• Dynamical systems theory and social cognition

• Neural mechanisms of social interaction: toward a second-person neuroscience

• Mutual prediction and adaptation in social interaction

• Motor resonance during human-robot interaction

The school will comprise keynote lectures in the mornings and discussion groups in the afternoons

which serve for in-depth discussions of topics from the keynote lectures. Results from these

discussions will be summarized and structured in drafts for Scholarpedia articles.

Confirmed Speakers:

Luciano Fadiga, University of Ferrara and IIT Genua, Italy

Tom Froese, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico D.F.

Mattia Gallotti, University of London, UK

Peter E. Keller, University of Western Sydney, Australia

Christian Keysers, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam,

John A Michael, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

Albert Newen, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

Andreas Roepstorff, Aarhus University, The Netherlands

Giulio Sandini, IIT Genua, Italy

Cordula Vesper, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

Kai Vogeley, University of Cologne, Germany

Date and location

The school will take place from Oct. 11-17, 2015, in Boltenhagen, a nice little beach resort at the

Baltic Sea and close to Hamburg (http://www.iberotel.de/iberotel-boltenhagen-ostsee-
deutschland.html).

Important dates:

- Application deadline: August 12, 2015

- Summer school: October 11—17, 2015

- Technical program: October 12—16, 2015

How to apply:

The school is open to PhD students and postdocs who are working on the themes addressed.

Interested participants shall submit written information on their scientific background, projects

involved, and motivation to attend. Admission will be on a competitive basis.

Applications should be sent via email to school2015@socSMCs.eu. Please state on a single page

(11pt font):

- Your scientific background and degree

- Your motivation to come to this school

- The topic of your thesis (if appropriate)

- Any prior knowledge in the field

Further information:

The forerunner project "Extending sensorimotor contingencies to cognition - eSMCs" (2011-2014)

funded previous schools in this series like "The future of the embodied mind", held 2011 in San

Sebastián, Spain (summerschool2011.esmcs.eu), the "Barcelona cognition, brain and technology

summer school" in 2012 (bcbt.upf.edu/bcbt11, co-funded) and "Embodiment and Morphological

Computation", held at the University of Zurich in 2013 (www.ifi.uzh.ch/ailab/summerschool2013).

For further questions, please contact us: school2015@socSMCs.eu.