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HCSNet Workshop on Speech, Perception, and Action: Call for Papers

HCSNet is holding a 2-Day Workshop on Speech, Perception and Action on Thursday and Friday 10-11 July 2008 at MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney (Bankstown campus).

The keynote speaker on day one will be Professor Jason Mattingley from the University of Queensland and the Queensland Brain Institute. The theme for day one will be Trans Cranial Magnetic Stimulation.

The keynote speaker on day two will be Dr Beatriz Calvo-Merino from University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. The theme for day two will be to discuss neural and behavioural mechanisms and other factors that mediate perception while people are acting and perception-action coupling.

All researchers with an interest in perceptions and actions, in any context, are invited to attend and to present their work. Graduate and Honours and senior undergraduate research students are particularly encouraged to attend and present their experimental, neuroscientific or computational research.

Please submit a title and 200 word abstract by the 12 June 2008 following the directions on the HCSNet website http://www.hcsnet.edu.au/hcsnetevents/2008/paworkshop .

HCSNet Priority Area: Perception and Action

Evidence accumulates that perception and action are linked. The process of producing actions and reading actions by others is one of neural mirroring or simulation.Despite the coupling of perception and action in humans, perception and action are often considered as separate domains of research. So too, many machine systems have been designed for either perception or production, e.g., automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, computer vision. As technology advances multimodal systems capable of both perception and production are on the increase. The way that humans attend to particular information from the wide array available, and use this information to guide and direct action is not only of theoretical and practical interest for studies on human behaviour and human movement, but also for human studies of when such behaviours go awry in such conditions as motor disorders, and studies of machine-based learning and robotics. No one discipline will solve these complex problems - an integrated interdisciplinary approach is required, which might include input from a range of areas, e.g.,visual and auditory perception, motor control, motor learning, cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, sign language, gesture analysis, non-verbal communication, music perception and performance, computer science, and signal processing. The Perception and Action Priority Area is a multidisciplinary group working on understanding the links between perceptions and actions, and on developing strategies for implementing that knowledge in practical ways.