I’m just leaving the 2015 CogSci conference, and am pondering what I saw there. I’m particularly dismayed at the lack of sophistication surrounding the notion of an external representation, especially the role and nature of ‘grounding’ in a representation—so I’ll focus on that in this post.
First, though, some quick impressions: It was exciting to see so much mathematical and numerical cognition going on. There were many fascinating posters, and also several great talks, a symposium, and a keynote focused on mathematics. People are saying exciting, new things, and it was fascinating to hear. I particularly enjoyed, as did many people, Kevin Mickey’s demonstration of the power of the unit circle as a central representation for trigonometry.