The international workshop “Cognitive Modules and Interfaces” took place from September 18th to 19th 2012. This workshop was held hosted by SISSA in Trieste after a lecture of Noam Chomsky who got the honorary doctorate degree from the Institute. The title of his lecture was “The minimalist program and language acquisition”.

This workshop provided a very wide range of thematic fields – language acquisition, music, mathematics, reasoning, animal communication, pragmatics and social cognition – which related to each other in terms of modular and/or domain-general processing. Moreover, cognitive neuroscience was one of the main approaches.

Keynote speakers and their topics:

LUCA BONATTI // ICREA and Pompeu Fabra Uni. Barcelona – Spain
At the origin of human rationality: infants’ reasoning about future events

STANISLAS DEHAENE // Collège de France and Neurospin, Saclay – France
From word to sentence: in search of the brain mechanisms for constituent structure

LUCIANO FADIGA // University of Ferrara and Italian Institute of Technology – Italy
On the sensorimotor grounding of speech and language

LILA GLEITMAN // University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia – USA
How to start at the beginning: the machinery of observational word learning

ISABELLE PERETZ // BRAMS/CRBLM University of Montreal – Canada
Music, language and modularity framed in action

CONSTANCE SCHARFF // Freie Universität Berlin – Germany
Thinking about language evolution at the zoo: insights from flies, birds, and bats

DAN SPERBER // CEU, Budapest – Hungary
Domain-general reasoning in a modular mind

Though empirical research approaches were dominant, theoretical issues were also discussed. Some ideas connecting current empirical researches to evolutionary research discourse opened a futher dimension, which made the discussions in this workshop more fruitful.

To visit official site of the workshop, click here!