Cognitive Science - Open Discussion

Join us for a friendly online round-table discussion about various topics in cognitive science.

These discussions are open to anyone broadly interested in cognitive sciences and are opportunities to meet other people who are also interested in cognitive sciences with whom to playfully and respectfully discuss ideas, study material, research, applications, career matters, and news related to cognitive science.

Our meetings aim to:

• Explore and learn cognitive science together
• Support personal and professional growth
• Network professionally and make new friends
• Enjoy good company and have fun

There is no required preparation for the discussion, although we might discuss materials shared by members in previous discussions.

Here's an illustrative selection of talks about relevant topics we might discuss:

• Thagard & Eliasmith - Minds in Machines: Comparing Biological and Synthetic Intelligence
• Dennett - From Bacteria to Bach and Back
• Panksepp – Notre Dame Symposium on Human Nature and Early Experience
• Seth - The Neuroscience of Consciousness
• Frith & Frith - The Science of Collaboration

We might also discuss interesting and relevant Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles, like the following articles:

• Cognitive Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• The Philosophy of Neuroscience
• Emotion
• Consciousness

And sometimes we also discuss interesting academic papers, like the following:

• Dong, M., Weststrate, N. M., & Fournier, M. A. (2023). Thirty years of psychological wisdom research: What we know about the correlates of an ancient concept. Perspectives on Psychological Science.
• Lieder, F., & Griffiths, T. L. (2020). Resource-rational analysis: Understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources. Behavioral and brain sciences.
• Albrecht, S. V., & Stone, P. (2018). Autonomous agents modelling other agents: A comprehensive survey and open problems. Artificial Intelligence.

The above lists aren't exhaustive. We've discussed other topics too. They're also not required material. They're meant to clarify the general kinds of topics that are welcome. Please feel free to suggest cognitive science related topics, and to share cognitive science talks and papers that you'd like us to discuss.

We have bigger lists of various kinds of cognitive science resources on our Google Sites FAQ Page, including links to free introductory courses on YouTube.

How To Join
These discussions will be hosted on our Discord server. You will need an invitation link to join the server. If you want the link, send me a message or leave a comment and I'll send a single-use Discord invite link that expires in 7 days to you.

You can join the server at any time and you only need to use the link once. Once you've joined the server, you can hop in and out of the voice channel at any time and use our text channels at any time. We meet together in the voice channel on the dates registered here on Meetup.

Sharing invitation links on request only helps us to get more realistic estimates of how many people might show up and it helps us to deal more effectively with trolls.

Here is a quick 10 min video explaining How to Use Discord.

Once you're on Discord, you can join our Discord server. Here is a quick video about how to join a Discord server.

If you're having trouble with audio and video, you should check your Audio and Video settings. Here is a quick video about How To Setup Audio and Video Settings.

For more complete information about how to use Discord, please see the official Discord documentation.

We're looking forward to seeing and discussing cognitive science with you!