cognitive science

#1236 Paul Thagard - Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness

Apr 3, 2026

Dr. Paul Thagard is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science. The Canada Council awarded him a Molson Prize (2007) and a Killam Prize (2013). He is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and author of many interdisciplinary books, the latest one being Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness. More»
#1212 Marina Dubova: The Cognitive Foundations of Science

Feb 6, 2026

Dr. Marina Dubova is an Omidyar postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research aims to reveal and inform the cognitive mechanisms of discovery. She develops formal (e.g., computational models) and empirical methods (e.g., cognitive experiments with scientists) to put the foundations of scientific method to rigorous tests. She uses insights from cognitive science to learn how theories and data can be integrated and lead to better understandings of the world. More»
#1185 Giovanni Rolla: Enactivism, Ecological Psychology, and Embodied Cognition

Dec 5, 2025

Dr. Giovanni Rolla is Professor of Philosophy at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil. His research is about enactivism, ecological psychology and radically embodied cognition in general (sometimes he deals with traditional epistemology as well, especially know-how, normativity and rationality). He is also a founding member of the Enactive Cognition and Narrative Practices research group (University of Wollongong), and a founding member of the Cognition, Language, Enaction and Affectivity research group. More»
#1164 Rafael Núñez: Embodied Cognition, Time, Space, and Mathematics

Oct 17, 2025

Dr. Rafael Núñez is a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Núñez investigates cognition from the perspective of the embodied mind. He is particularly interested in high-level cognitive phenomena such as conceptual systems, abstraction, and inference mechanisms, as they manifest themselves naturally through largely unconscious bodily/mental activity (e.g., gesture production co-produced with a variety of conceptual mappings). He is the author of Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. More»
#1122 Daniela Rodrigues: Communication in Apes and Humans, and the Cognitive Foundations of Language

Jul 11, 2025

Dr. Evelina Daniela Rodrigues is an invited assistant professor at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, where she teaches Master’s students about the cognitive foundations of language. She studies gestural communication in human and non-human primates. Beyond communication, she is also interested in other aspects of social development and cognition, including interactions among social partners (such as hierarchy and social bonds), social learning and culture, object manipulation and tool use, and theory of mind. More»
#1119 Anna Ivanova: Language and Large Language Models

Jul 4, 2025

Dr. Anna Ivanova is Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech. She is interested in studying the relationship between language and other aspects of human cognition. In her work, she uses tools from cognitive neuroscience (such as fMRI) and artificial intelligence (such as large language models). More»
#1116 Adam Safron: Consciousness, AI, Psychedelics, and The Self

Jun 27, 2025

Dr. Adam Safron is Research Fellow at the Allen Discovery Institute at Tufts University, and is leading an interdisciplinary research program at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies. Most of his work has focused on characterizing the nature of preferences and motivation from mechanistic, developmental, and evolutionary perspectives. He has also studied the effects of brief mindfulness interventions on cognition and well-being. While conducting this research, he developed a neurophenomenological model of sensory absorption and ecstatic states via neural entrainment, which eventually led to developing a synthetic theory of consciousness attempting to integrate across seemingly conflicting perspectives. More»
#1106 Kevin Hong: Magic, Divination, and Dream Interpretation Across Societies

Jun 5, 2025

Dr. Kevin Hong is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Macau. He is broadly interested in human behavior and culture, and currently has three lines of research: magic, divination, and epistemic norms in small-scale societies; reporting biases in the transmission of instrumental practices; and theoretical modeling of the transmission of culture. More»
#1094 Cody Moser: Collective Intelligence and Cultural Innovation

May 8, 2025

Cody Moser is a PhD candidate and Fletcher Jones Fellow in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced, and a 2024 Junior Fellow at The Institute for Humane Studies. He works on questions examining the relationship between structure and adaptation in social, biological, economic, and neural systems from a complex systems perspective. To do this, he utilizes methods from network theory, agent-based modeling, and large-scale corpus analysis. More»
#1054 Kathryn Nave - A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life

Feb 3, 2025

Dr. Kathryn Nave is a Leverhulme Trust early career research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on developing a realist account of autonomy and agency, grounded in the uniquely metabolic existence of living systems, and upon critiquing the machine concept of the organism in light of this distinctive material instability. She is the author of A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life. More»