This proposal seeks to support US graduate student participation in the 2012 annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Sapporo Japan, along with research interchanges and collaborations with Japanese labs immediately subsequent to the conference.
For 33 years, the Cognitive Science Society has been the premiere international organization for research in Cognitive Science. The Society brings together researchers from many fields that hold a common goal: understanding the nature of cognition as it appears in biological organisms and finds its pinnacle in humans, and as it is simulated in artificial systems. In general, the meeting provides a forum for the first communication of state-of-the-art research in cognitive science, focusing on a broad range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary topics, with representation from psychology, computer science, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.
Each year, the annual meeting includes a rich selection of tutorials and workshops available to students. Workshops and tutorials can be helpful in any academic discipline, but they are especially needed in cognitive science because it is very rare that students come from programs with expertise spanning the breadth of the field. Research in many areas of cognitive science has flourished over the past decade in Japan. The time is therefore ripe for fostering international, interdisciplinary research interchanges and collaborations.
For 34 years, the Cognitive Science Society has been the premiere international organization for research in Cognitive Science. The Society brings together researchers from many fields that hold a common goal: Understanding the nature of cognition as it appears in biological organisms and finds its pinnacle in humans, and as it is simulated in artificial systems. The Society promotes scientific exchange among researchers in disciplines comprising the field of Cognitive Science, including Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Developmental and Learning Sciences, and Education. The annual meeting was in Sapporo, Japan in 2012, for the first time in the society's history. Cognitive Science research in Asia has flourished in recent years, and the annual meeting provided an opportunity to facilitate research exchanges between the US and Japan. With support of the National Science Foundation, seven US graduate students visited cognitive science laboratories for a number of days before or after the Cognitive Science Society meeting. This support was advertised to cognitive science graduate students throughout the US, and students submitted applications for support to visit particular researchers and labs in Japan, based on potential or nascent research collaborations. Applicants were chosen based on the intellectual merits of their lab visits, in terms of potential for high quality research outcomes, and also the broader impacts of their visit, which mainly consisted of educational and training outcomes for the students. The visits covered research topics in spatial cognition, non-verbal communication, scientific reasoning, the cognitive science of physics, human-robot interaction, language acquisition, and the neuroscience of visual attention.