Program
to be announced
List of Abstracts
Tomer Czaczkes
Title: Advanced cognition with hard limits in an insect
Short Description: A growing body of evidence ascribes surprisingly advanced cognitive abilities to insects. For example, ants seem to have a surprisingly advanced grasp of the affordance of the physical world around them. However, describing the surprising limits to cognition – what simply cannot be learned, and how animals nonetheless solve problems which are beyond their cognitive abilities, may be under-emphasised in animal cognition research.
Rebecca Dreier
Title: Episodic Memory and Consciousness: Why They Come Together in Animals
Short Description: In this paper, I argue that episodic memory is likely to be conscious in any animal by considering episodic memory’s close entanglement with conscious processes. Theories of consciousness, like the Perceptual Reality Monitoring Theory (Lau 2022) or the Global Workspace Theory (Baars, 1995; Dehaene & Naccache, 2001; Shea & Frith, 2019), argue that specific processes are responsible for conscious experience. I show that episodic memory, defined by its constructive process and a basic mnemonic function, is deeply connected to those processes and therefore likely to be conscious. Thus, for any animal with such a capacity, it is likely that they have phenomenally conscious episodic memory, instead of merely episodic-like memory.
Daria Zakharova
Talk title: “Causal Cognition: Beyond Perlian Creatures”.
Short description: The paper argues that reafference – a cognitive mechanism enabling differentiation between self-generated and externally-generated sensory signals – allows non-Pearlian creatures to successfully exploit causal structure of their noisy, complex environment. We argue that this mechanism is at work in human infants and propose that it can be modelled in AI systems to enable a more biologically plausible account of causal learning.