WORKSHOP ON SEGMENTATION OF BEHAVIOR

An interdisciplinary Workshop on segmentation of behavior is planned as a part of the Second Biennial Conference on Cognitive Science (June 9–13, 2006, St. Petersburg). Behavior of organisms — from animal movements to the highest forms of behavior, such as human speech, — is characterized by a number of common patterns. (As an example one can mention the cases of lingering, observed in the movement of lab animals, and the analogous phenomenon of hesitation found both within and between speech segments, that is, prosodic units.) The goad of the Workshop is to reveal and discuss such common patterns. The questions to be addressed at the Workshop include the following:

• Of what segments does behavior consist?
• How discrete are boundaries between segments?
• What are the indicators of inter-segment boundaries?
• What determines the integral nature of individual segments?
• What methods of analytic discovery of the segments of behavior and boundaries between them can be used?
• What patterns of behavior segmentation are universal, and what are specific to a particular species or form of behavior?
• Is the notion of behavior continuum compatible with the segmented, quantized charater of many forms of behavior?

The Workshop is planned to consist of six to eight half-hour presentations. The overall length of workshop is a half of a working day. The working languages of the Workshop are Russian and English.

All specialists in cognitive studies are invited for participation in the Workshop. If you are interested please email an abstract of your presentation, devoted to problems of behavior segmentation, to the address cogsci06@cs.msu.su. In the text of the message please indicate:

• the title of the paper
• the author(s) information, including:
  • full name
  • affiliation
  • educational status or degree (undergraduate student, graduate student, Ph.D., etc.)
  • postal address
  • phone number
  • e-mail address
• 5 to 7 keywords

The text of the abstract, attached to the message, must be in Russian or English and no longer than 2 pages long (single-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 type size), including illustrations and references. Please use the MS Word format; in case of complex graphics, please use PDF.

The deadline for submissions is November 15, 2005.
Authors will be informed of the decisions on acceptance by February 15, 2006.

Workshop chairs:

Konstantin V. Anokhin (Institute of Normal Physiology, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences), k_anokhin@yahoo.com
Andrej A. Kibrik (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences), kibrik@comtv.ru

• download the seminar description in .zip, or in .doc.