Abstract
The goal of this workshop is to explore the possibility of a common conceptual framework capable of unifying research on compositionality across disciplinary and methodological boundaries.
To achieve this goal, the workshop will be a forum for discussion with leading researchers in developmental and cognitive psychology, human and systems neuroscience, and AI. The speakers will share their latest research and engage with the following inter-related outstanding questions:
- How to evaluate whether a system is compositional? What is the smallest interesting test case for compositionality?
- What are each discipline's most recent empirical findings that can help build a shared understanding of compositional systems?
- What neural mechanisms underlie compositional cognitive processes?
- Is compositional thought implemented via one domain-general system or multiple domain-specific systems? What are its representational and architectural prerequisites?
- Is there a risk that a generous definition of compositionality makes it too universal to be useful?
You can find the submitted proposal here
Organizers
University of Birmingham
Central European University
MIT
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL
Online Session: Compositionality in Mathematics and Nonlinguistic Reasoning
We will anticipate the CogSci conference with a preliminary online session focusing on compositionality in Mathematics and Nonlinguistic Reasoning.
The online session will take place on June 26th, 2024 and will unfold over zoom: details will be shared here, on mailing lists, and on twitter in the weeks preeceding the event. The time will be as follows:
- 3-5:15 PM Central European Time
- 9:11:15 AM Eastern Standard Time
Times in the table below are given in Central European Time:
| Time | Name | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 3:00pm | Akshita Srinivasan & Elizabeth Spelke | Young children’s compositional reasoning about numbers |
| 3:30pm | Stephen Ferrigno | How do children, adults, and non-human primates represent center-embedded sequences? |
| 4:00pm | Lorenzo Ciccione & Théo morfoisse | Exploring mathematical composition in children through drawing and music |
| 4:30pm | Paul Muhle-Karbe | Flexible representations for context-dependent navigation |
In Person Session
Other details
More details
| Time | Name | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Frameworks for Compositionality | ||
| tbd | Brenden Lake | Compositional generalization through meta-learning neural networks |
| tbd | Liina Pylkkänen | How do our brains order syntactic and semantic computations when no order is imposed from the input? |
| Compositionality in Cognition | ||
| tbd | Eric Schulz | TBA |
| tbd | Isabelle Dautriche | Non-linguistic compositionality in 9-month-old infants |
| tbd | Fosca Al Roumi | The human brain compresses information in memory using a Language of Thought |
| Compositionality in Brains and Neurons | ||
| tbd | Mohamady El-Gaby | A cellular basis for mappingbehavioural structure |
| tbd | Alla Karpova | Towards the neural underpinnings of compositionality |
| tbd | Liping Wang | The control of sequence working memory in macaque frontal cortex. |
| Compositionality in AI | ||
| tbd | Noémi Éltető | Reusing action sequences for efficient planning |
| tbd | Kevin Ellis | Proposing experiments and acquiring concepts using language and code |