This talk presents the area of intercultural communication and provides some reflections on the relation between cognitive science and intercultural communication.
Among the issues discussed are:
(i) How should we conceive of cultural differences?
(ii) How great are cultural differences?
(iii) Some examples of cultural differences in communication.
(iv Are there universals of human cognition?
(v) What is the relation between culture - language and cognition?
(vi) How do cultural differences influence understanding in communication?
(vii) How are attitudes and values related to understanding?

This talk will address the issue of command and control work in response operations, such as large-scale search & rescue. The talk will focus on the dynamics of response operations and the complexity that command and control organizations have to meet in order to successfully accomplish their missions. This will include examples demonstrating the qualitative and quantitative differences between emergency, crisis and disaster response. Furthermore, the talk will introduce modeling and simulation as an approach to address some of the research and training needs in command and control. Particular attention will be given to various concepts and approaches related to Cognitive Science and how these support the modeling process and simulation design. The talk will illustrate these issues using an example of the Swedish Joint Response Team, analyses of the team’s past operations (e.g. 2004 Tsunami and 2006 Lebanon-war evacuation & support missions), and development of a training program for the team’s commanding staff.

Digital products that attempt to set the scene for emotional experiences, bodily interactions, persuasive processes, aesthetic experiences and other experiential qualities, are gaining grounds both in the commercial world and in the so-called “third-wave of HCI”-movement within academia. While a typical HCI-goals used to be ease of use or learnability, we now discuss design qualities such as suppleness, game play, embodiment, reflection, affective loops or pliability. In this talk, I will discuss these new design qualities and the kinds of challenges we meet when designing for physical, emotional, and bodily involvement. I will examplify with systems that we have built (or are building) in my lab, such as eMoto, mobile emotional messaging using gesture, Affective Diary, a way to remember your bodily and social experiences, and Affective Health, a mobile service empowering users to deal with stress.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, researchers been studying neuropsychology by investigating how brain injury affects behaviour and mental function. This approach has been very good at helping us discover how cognitive abilities like memory, attention and language are organised in the brain, but very bad at helping us understand the workings of things like free will, belief and intentionality. Psychiatric and neuropsychiatric disorders, such as psychosis, are pathologies of exactly these sorts of human characteristics and cognitive neuropsychiatry aims to understand normal mind and brain function through studying mental disorder, and attempts to explain mental disorder within normal models of psychological function. This talk will discuss the cognitive neuropsychiatry approach and what it's telling us about how the mind and brain work in both sickness and in health.

The explanation of consciousness and the creation of conscious machines will have profound effects on information technology and our philosophical understanding of ourselves as human beings.

Traditional Artificial Intelligence methods have not created real intelligence, machines do not think and are not aware. Consciousness has not emerged via the execution of computer algorithms; real cognition is different.

Human cognition involves processes like perception, real world learning, real world reasoning, episodic memory, emotions, natural language and consciousness. A cognitive system would integrate these processes seamlessly.

To be phenomenally conscious is to perceive via qualia. All our percepts involve qualia, the apparent qualities of the perceived entity. Colors, taste, smell, touch, pain etc. are examples of qualia. Numeric computers do not have qualia while a phenomenally conscious machine would perceive its mental content and the world via qualia. These qualia would not have to be similar to human qualia.

Recent research has revealed that emotions have an important role in cognition. Percepts are seen to have emotional significance, which guides attention and modulates learning. Emotional significance seems to be an important factor in judgment and decision-making. Emotions seem to have motivational effects, too. Emotions have some connection to qualia; to be in an emotional state feels like something.

Humans have silent inner speech, which allows us to hear what we think by looping back the products of thought processes into the percepts of “heard” speech. Similar feedback loops are probably operating also with other sensory faculties. Inner speech may not be a necessary condition for consciousness, but the presence of inner speech may be a positive indication of consciousness.

The problem of consciousness is not yet solved. The spectrum of unsolved issues provides great opportunities to cognitive scientists and information technology engineers. Great inventions await.

Man and the machine, science, the monster and humanity and far beyond future. As an artist you are free to guess, to imagine and predict. Many of the ideas that scientists are working with today artists have already been described decades ago. Just think of the SF-culture. Where do new ideas grow, within the science alone or does science pick up ideas from films, literature, philosophers and artists?

I will take off from my own projects Frankenstein’s Monster, Beyond Future and Man Machine describe the relation between man and machine, science and philosophy, fantasy and reality. In my project art meets science and science meets the groundbreaking ideas of the future minds of the most far out artists and thinkers.

According to a long tradition in Western thinking, starting at least as early as with Aristotle, humans are the only creatures with a conscious lifelike imaginary world. Consequently, only humans can remember past episodes and simulate potential future ones. The existence of this ability has also been central in some catholic thinking when trying to give evidence for the detached and immortal human soul. However, recent research on great apes and corvids throw serious doubts on this assumption. For example three studies conducted on chimpanzees and orang-utans show their skill in flexible anticipation of future events; even disregarding current motivational states in doing so. Children under the age of four or five cannot perform these kinds of tasks. And, perhaps even more interesting is that members of a rare clinical group that lack episodic abilities, but have the semantic system intact, seem to be unable to pass such a challenge. The episodic system, allowing us to remember the particularities of the past and constructing new episodes of a potential future, is highly associated with a complex self-consciousness. In other words, the results suggest advanced consciousness in great apes. The opponents of this interpretation have proposed that the apes might use what they call semantic prospection – the forward directed equivalent of semantic memory; the apes simply “know” the future without any imagination involved. I will show how this standpoint is nearly theoretically impossible, and hence advocate the hypothesis that humans are not alone in the conscious imaginary world within.