One month ago I went to UseR 2013 in Albacete, Spain wich was a great conference featuring 33° C and many interesting presentations. Surpisingly CogSci 2013 in Berlin, which I attended this week, was even warmer, outside it is currenly 36° C! There were also many interesting presentations at CogSci 2013 with some of the highlights being:
- The symposia on Music Cognition inlcuding a talk by Edward Large on how to model pitch and harmony perception using dynamical systems.
- A tutorial on Dynamic Field Theory by John Spencer, Gregor Schoener, and Yulia Sandamirskaya. They are working on an introductory book on Dynamic Field Theory which I’m very much looking forward to.
- Two presentations on how to approximate Bayesian computation using artificial neural networks and sparse distributed memory.
- Philip Pärnamets presented fascinating evidence for that what we look at influences decisions in moral desicion tasks and that by manipulating what participants are looking at it is possible to manipulate their moral decisions.
A very diverse list of highlights but that’s cognitive science… I also present a poster (+ conference article) together with Erik Lagerstedt and Peter Gärdenfors on an oscillator model of categorical rhythm perception that we’ve developed. Here’s the abstract:
Categorical perception is a well studied phenomenon in, for example, colour perception, phonetics and music. In this article we implement a dynamical systems model of categorical rhythm perception based on the resonance theory of rhythm perception developed by Large (2010). This model is used to simulate the categorical choices of participants in two experiments of Desain and Honing (2003). The model is able to accurately replicate the experimental data. Our results support that resonance theory is a viable model of rhythm perception and they show that by viewing rhythm perception as a dynamical system it is possible to model properties of categorical perception.
Here’s a link to the full conference article and here is the reference to the article:
Bååth, R., Lagerstedt, E. and Gärdenfors, P. (2013) An Oscillator Model of Categorical Rhythm Perception. In Knauff, M., Pauen, M., Sebanz, N., and Wachsmuth, I. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (1803-1808). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.