Society for Complex Systems in Cognitive Science

SCSCS Meeting 2017 cancelled 

About the SCSCS

Complex systems theory (CST) describes the behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems entailing many degrees of freedom. While relevant to phenomena in physics, biology, and ecology, CST also offers a potentially integrative framework for issues relating to mind, brain, and behavior. This integrative potential is due to CST’s ability to address phenomena relevant to cognitive science that reside at nested, yet distinct levels of scale. For example, while CST can address both agent-environment relationships and on-going brain dynamics, it can also address the computations taking place in neural networks and cellular automata. The dynamics at these nested levels of scale are inherently self-organizing, context dependent and synergistically coupled (i.e., they are mutually influential and, thus, mutually constraining). Given CST’s ability to address such multi-scale interaction, it constitutes a method and a perspective that affords cognitive science the ability to address issues such as cause and effect, mind and brain, and body and environment, in novel ways.

While CST is a well-established domain in mathematics, and has found broad application in the sciences, psychologists who utilize it in their work often find themselves operating on the fringe of their discipline. Given CST’s potential, this state of affairs needs to change. Thus, our aim is to provide researchers interested in complex systems in cognitive science an institutional home; specifically, the SCSCS.

We envisage a society aimed at theoretical innovation in the discipline of psychology. This initiative is understood as broad and ecumenical, allowing for theoretical diversity as well as common interests. In particular, ecological and representational accounts are complementary rather than mutually exclusive within this framework, and common interests include the understanding of mental life as taking place in the context of the natural world, biological evolution, embodiment, acculturation, and social interaction. Such multi-scale interaction constitutes the hallmark of complex systems. And given the state-of-the-art techniques CST puts at our disposal for understanding such systems, it is time to create an institutional space in which this understanding can flourish.