The detailed schedule and abstracts of the PhD talks can be found here. The detailed list of posters can be found here.

The following speakers will share their expertise in keynotes and workshops:

About the PhD Research talks:

Participants may give a short talk, present a poster, or both; please indicate this in the registration form. Talks are planned for ten-minute slots with five minutes for questions. The talks are an opportunity to present an overview of your research and discuss it with your fellows. They will be assigned to a timeslot on one of the three days of the symposium.

About the Project Challenge:

Context is a term of emerging importance with many interpretations and potential applications across cognitive science. Many facets of how context affects or springs from our cognition and may be integrated into (neural network or AI) models still remain to be investigated.

How may we find out more about it? Answering this question is the aim of the symposium’s Project Challenge.

This challenge, as a central and active part of the symposium, is intended to be tackled in groups. In particular, we aim for groups of participants from different fields with different specialties and areas of expertise, to reap the benefits of diverse perspectives, pool their knowledge, and hopefully, allow for new insights and connections to drive future research. In this challenge, the participants will work together to conceptualize a project probing our understanding of context in cognition.

Your task will be to form a team, come up with a project, conceptualize it, and pitch it at the end of the symposium (day 3).

Guidelines for the projects:

  • Specify a research question or hypothesis to tackle. It should relate to the topic of ‘Context’, otherwise, you may choose without restriction. Feel free to be creative!

  • Methodology or subject matter are also free to choose. You could design or code a new cognitive model, or work out an experimental design aimed at answering an open question in the field. Again, creativity is welcome and encouraged.

  • While there may not be time to complete your project within the bounds of the symposium, do prepare a plan of how you would do so, the more specific the better.

  • Naturally, you do not need to actually implement your project proposal after the symposium, although it would be fantastic if you did. This is intended as an opportunity to connect with potential collaborators, discover new approaches and gain inspiration for future work. We hope you keep this in mind while making your choice.

  • Prizes will be awarded for the best project at the end of the symposium!

Group assignment:

Note: Due to some participants unfortunately dropping out the group assignment has been reshuffled. Groups have been combined and renamed.

Invited talks & workshops: Titles & abstracts

Prof. Dr. Martin Butz: “How do we actively contextualize our behaviour?”

Our environment surrounds us with distinct interaction options and forces. It offers external, local context, which naturally constrains our behaviour – and thus also our sensorimotor experiences. The spatiotemporal structure yields localities - such as punctual, non-linear force changes – which are segmented by our brains into events and episodes embedded into the surrounding context. Nonetheless, even if constrained by the local environmental context, in principle there are myriads of interaction options at any point in time. To copy with this complexity, our brain has evolved fascinating computational structures and algorithms. In this talk I will elaborate how our brain selectively infers abstract contexts, and contextual schemata, in a task-oriented manner in order to generate adaptive behaviour fast and energy efficiently. I will first give inspiration of the general principle and then elaborate on key ingredients – including computational modules and neural algorithms – that appear to be at play. In conclusion, I point out what appears missing in large language models and how this lack may be abolished over the next years.

Dr. Marcel Binz: “How context influences prediction”

In this workshop, we will investigate how context influences the predictions of large language models (LLMs). For this, we will use the prediction of movie ratings given by users as an example. We will cover how to use open-source LLMs for this kind of analysis, experiment with different types of contextual information, do a little bit of statistical analysis, and brainstorm whether this approach could be used to identify user preferences. It is recommended that attendees have a Google account to access the free GPUs on Google Colab for a part of this workshop.

Link to the workshop materials: here

Prof. Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann: “Voices”

Voices (auditory hallucinations) are experiences in which someone has a thought that they feel is not their own. This work draws on data from extensive fieldwork and from hundreds of interviews conducted across multiple countries to examine the prevalence and variability of these experiences. I will discuss what we know about the difference between the voices found in psychosis and in the general population, and the evidence that three factors (porosity, absorption and training) facilitate voices in the general population. Most fundamentally, I will argue that voices teach us something about consciousness more generally: that we have contradictory intuitions about our own thoughts which are elaborated or ignored by local culture, and that these intuitions facilitate this felt disavowal of thought.

Dr. Sarah Schwöbel: “Contextual inference in Bayesian cognitive modeling”

How do we know what context we are currently in? And how does the context shape our decision making? This workshop attempts to give a precise computational answer to these questions by formalizing context in a Bayesian cognitive model. You will play around with an interactive notebook that illustrates these concepts without much required knowledge in modeling or coding.

Links to the notebooks: notebook 1a, notebook 1b, notebook 2a and notebook 2b.

Dr. Asya Achimova: “Applying for third-party funding”

It is never too early to start thinking about your next (or first) grant application. In this workshop, we will sketch out the stages of applying for third-party funding. They include: finding an appropriate funding schema and checking eligibility conditions, brainstorming and ideation, developing your proposal, getting feedback, and revising your application. We will see what information is available at the University of Tübingen and websites of granting agencies and where you can seek support in your grant-writing process. The workshop features a combination of instructor’s input and hands-on writing exercises to get the process started.

Link to materials: here