Neurodiversity of cognitive feelings Workshop

in ICDL 2022

As part of the ICDL 2022 (https://icdl2022.qmul.ac.uk/) we will host a half-day workshop that aims to bring together multidisciplinary researchers from developmental psychology, cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and robotics to share their expertise on cognitive feeling and emotional sensations across neurodiversity.

Schedule

Submission deadline August 13, 2022

Notification of acceptance August 27, 2022

Workshop presentations September 12, 2022

Theme

From the general conception of our own subjective experiences, and from behavioural and neuroimaging research we know that affective emotional states can influence our cognitive functions. While the existence of this relationship is generally accepted, understanding the neural mechanisms that lead to individual diversity remains an open question that requires continued development of understanding and assessment of individual cognitive abilities. One of the suggested pathways includes the perception of emotional sensations that are experienced towards multisensory perception systems with a cognitive feeling. Cognitive feeling can be described as a sense of confidence, knowing, familiarity, distinguishing reality and fluency of information from multisensory perceptual experiences (Clore and Parrott, 1994; Arango-Muñoz 2014). Where emotional sensations, or affective feelings, are the result of perceived multisensory integration such as liking, disliking, or fear, arousal. Each kind of feeling is then providing information about different system. The affective feeling provides information on whether or not what is perceived is positive or negative with regards to our expectations. The cognitive feeling is the informational source of our expectations; knowing and understanding the multisensory information. The principles of cognitive feeling can be applied in developmental and cognitive robotics (Asada et al. 2009; Tani 2016), predictive coding theories (Friston & Kiebel 2009; Friston 2010), computational psychiatry (Montague et al. 2012), and behavioural studies through the verification of virtual reality based approaches.

References

Clore & Parrott (1994) Cognitive feelings and metacognitive judgments. European Journal of Social Psychology, 24(1), 101–115.

Arango-Muñoz, S. (2014) The nature of epistemic feelings. Philosophical Psychology, 27(2), 193-211.　

Tani (2016) Exploring robotic minds: actions, symbols, and consciousness as self-organizing dynamic phenomena. Oxford University Press.

Asada et al (2009) Cognitive Developmental Robotics: A Survey, in IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 1(1), 12-34.

Friston & Kiebel (2009) Predictive coding under the free-energy principle. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 364(1521):1211-21.

Friston (2010) The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?. Nature Review Neuroscience, 11, 127–138.

Montague, Dolan, Friston, & Dayan (2012) Computational psychiatry. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(1), 72-80.

Keynote Talks

Professor Sarah Garfinkel, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK (confirmed)

Dr Sophie Betka, The École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland (confirmed)

Professor Tony Prescott, Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield, UK (confirmed)

Call for short talks & poster presentations

Methods and results from behavioral, computational, cognitive neuroscience, developmental robotics, and virtual reality verification are welcomed to this workshop. Possible topics of research are listed below.

• Affective Neuroscience

• Affective Computation

• Interoception

• Self-awareness and self-recognition

• Rubber hand illusion and bodily illusion

• Sense of agency

• Sense of presence

• Psychiatric disorder and developmental disorder

• Consciousness

• Brain-body interactions

• Metacognitive feeling