Interdisciplinary Workshop for young researchers

Linking language to motor concepts
Cognitive correlates of grasping actions

Plenary Speakers

 David Peeters
(MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)
"The Power of pointing in linking language to the world"

Markus Vincze
(Technical University of Vienna)
"Human and Robot Object Grasping"

Considerable work has been done concerning the link of language to other cognitive domains, in particular motor cognition. In this interdisciplinary workshop, we aim at bringing together young researchers (including, but not limited to researchers from the University of Vienna) to discuss their work with experts from various fields. We particularly would like to encourage young researchers from the cognitive sciences: linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, anthropology, philosophy and psychology who have a focus on the topic of linking language to motor cognition.

 
Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):

 -     empirical and theoretical approaches to language and to motor cognition in the fields of linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy, psychology, anthropology

-     cognitive mechanisms involved in the relation between the language system and the conceptual system (in particular motor cognition) such as eye-hand-coordination, haptic perception, motor-concept variation in action verbs, motor planning, object detection…

-     the production, perception and understanding of (referential) langauge and motor gestures: e. g. pointing, grasping, touching ...

We solicit abstracts for short input presentations of 20 minutes from PhD students of different disciplines. We would particularly like to encourage young researchers from Vienna to participate as speakers. The presentations will be held in focus groups with ample room for discussion and constructive interdisciplinary feedback on the individual PhD projects. We also invite researchers and students with an interest in the topic who do not give a presentation!

Abstracts for presentations (one page) and workshop registrations (without presentation) may be submitted by sending an informal email to the organizers (Juliane Fink or Timo Ahlers).