Ph.D. Student Symposium

Required Documents (in German or English):

1. Program Concept (max. 2 pages)
2. Structural Design of the School with a Focus on Supporting and Networking Doctoral Students in Cognitive Science (max. 2 pages)
3. Financial plan, including, if applicable, a breakdown of participation fees and the applicant’s own contribution (Important note: Increases in or the introduction of participation fees after the application has been approved will not be accepted. In such cases, the right to receive funding will be forfeited because the conditions of approval have not been met) (max. 1 page)
4. A statement from a professor assuming overall financial responsibility for organizing the symposium.

Applicant Team:

Applications must be submitted by a group of at least three doctoral students from at least two institutes working in different disciplinary or methodological areas. The applicant team may consist of up to five people.

Application Deadline and Submission:

Specified in the current call for proposals.

Decision:

The Executive Board of the Society for Cognitive Science / Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft will decide on the submitted applications.

Impressions:

particiant photo:

Orgateam:

Panel Discussion:

Keynote talks

• Prof. Dr. Martin Butz – “How do we actively contextualize our behaviour?”: Prof. Butz presented a computational perspective on how the brain infers abstract contexts from spatiotemporal structure to enable adaptive, efficient behavior. He concluded with a comparison to current limitations of large language models (LLMs) and future development directions.
• Prof. Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann – “Voices”: Drawing from extensive cross-cultural research, Prof. Luhrmann discussed auditory hallucinations in clinical and non-clinical populations, emphasizing cultural factors and psychological traits shaping these experiences and their implications for understanding consciousness.

Workshops

• Dr. Marcel Binz – “How context influences prediction”: Participants explored how contextual variables affect LLM predictions using user movie ratings. The session involved practical modeling tasks and discussions on identifying user preferences.
• Dr. Sarah Schwöbel – “Contextual inference in Bayesian cognitive modeling”: The workshop took place as an interactive introduction to Bayesian models of contextual inference and decision-making. Dr. Schwöbel used Jupyter notebooks, enabling participants without much prior technical knowledge to learn the first practical steps of Bayesian modeling.
• Dr. Asya Achimova – “Applying for third-party funding” (not recorded): A hands-on guide to the grant application process, covering funding sources, proposal development, and support resources available at the University of Tübingen.

PhD Talks and Poster Sessions
The symposium featured 11 PhD talks, 10 of which were recorded. Each presentation consisted of a 10-minute talk followed by a 5-minute Q&A session. The talks showcased a wide range of topics, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the event. Research areas included artificial intelligence, robotics, neurocognitive science, philosophy of mind, and cognitive psychology.
In addition, we hosted two poster sessions after an enthusiastic request from participants to extend the first round. Across both sessions, 15 posters were presented over a total of three hours, allowing ample time for in-depth discussion. All abstracts for the talks and posters are available on our website.

Project Challenge
The project challenge served as a central interactive component of the symposium, encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration on the topic of context in cognition.
Participants were grouped based on diverse academic backgrounds and areas of expertise to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue. Each group was tasked with conceptualizing a novel research project that explores context in cognition, with an emphasis on originality, feasibility, and theoretical contribution.
Seven groups presented diverse and fascinating project proposals. Then participants voted to elect the winning team, which received small prizes.

From November 12th to 14th 2024, the Center for Cognitive Science at the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau hosted the 2024 Doctoral Symposium on Cognitive Science at the Villa Denis in the Palatinate Forest, Frankenstein, Germany. The event brought together approximately 60 attendees, including 37 enthusiastic PhD candidates alongside professors and colleagues, from 17 institutions across Europe to explore the topic “Beyond Averages – Individual Differences in Cognition”.

The symposium offered insights from various disciplines within Cognitive Science, such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and neuroscientific methods. It provided a platform for young researchers to discuss their ongoing work in the field of Cognitive Science. The 18 oral and 23 poster contributions explored topics from emotion processing and regulation to cultural influences, visual and auditory perception, language acquisition, consciousness, mind wandering, neural development and aging, bilingual word processing, knowledge and intelligence, quantified learning, driving safety, human-robot interaction, and deep learning. Interactive workshops on scientific writing, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and experimental design using virtual reality offered hands-on methodological experience. Of course, no symposium is complete without social connections, and the evenings at Villa Denis featured lively gatherings with memorable connections.

The symposium concluded with an inspiring keynote lecture by Gregor Schöner on the Dynamic Field Theory and its implications for understanding higher cognition as the emergent product of neural population interactions. The 2024 Doctoral Symposium was a resounding success—scientifically stimulating, socially engaging, and a space for emerging scholars to learn and share ideas.

The Technical University of Darmstadt and its Center for Cognitive Science hosted the 2nd Doctoral Symposium on Cognitive Science, which focused on perspectives on learning and science communication. It took place from April 6 to 8, 2022. A total of 37 doctoral students from 14 different institutions in Germany and Austria participated in the symposium and presented research in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and education.

Closing Remarks from the Organizers: We all thoroughly enjoyed the presentations and lively discussions during the symposium and would like to thank everyone for participating! We’d like to extend a special thank you to our keynote speakers on science communication, Jens Foell (NaWik) and Iris Proff (Science Media Center). We all gained many insights into this important topic and hope to incorporate some of their ideas into our own careers. If you are interested in organizing the 3rd GK Doctoral Symposium, please contact Prof. Barbara Kaup. We look forward to the next symposium!

On January 23 and 24, 2020, the first GK Doctoral Symposium on Cognitive Science took place at the University of Tübingen. The event was attended by 27 early-career researchers from 13 different institutions in Germany and Luxembourg, who presented their work on topics such as working memory, consciousness, embedded cognition, computer modeling, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.

Despite the wide range of topics, the event was driven by a shared enthusiasm for advancing the scientific understanding of cognitive processes through the discussion of various approaches to this topic.