Satellite Events

Computational Consciousness Science 

A recent explosion in interest in computational models of consciousness comes from both our attempts to extend computational models of perception and cognition to their subjective aspects and from the importance of consciousness to the ethical implications of AI models.

This satellite meeting examines computational approaches from the points of view of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, with keynotes from David Chalmers (philosophy), Marisa Carrasco (psychology), and Biyu He (neuroscience).

There will also be research talks from faculty, postdocs, and PhDs highlighting the contribution of computational models to our understanding of change-blindness, iconic memory, spatial perception, and visual illusions, as well as helping us to develop new measures of conscious awareness.

A closing panel discussion will explore new and future directions for the emerging discipline of computational consciousness science.

Date: Saturday, August 1, 2026

Location: New York University, 19 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012

Registration: Free but please register because we have to give a list of attendees to security.

Link for details and registration: https://computationalconsciousness.github.io/

Metacognitive Science

This satellite meeting showcases the latest research on metacognition, in the form of both keynotes and short oral presentations. We aim to be a venue for interdisciplinary discussions around all aspects of metacognition, cross-cutting psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and computer science. Our community represents an entirely new model of scientific community building: a roving satellite meeting, designed to approach and synergistically mingle with relevant scientific communities across philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence on an annual cycle. We aim to join a different meeting every year to best benefit from and foster interdisciplinary community building.

Date: Sunday, August 2, 2026

Location: Schermerhorn Hall, 501 Schermerhorn, Columbia University Campus

Registration: Free but please do sign up because we may have to give a list of registrants to a security guard.

Link for details and registration: www.metacognitivescience.org 

Forks in the Road: Developmental Trajectories and Symptom Dynamics in Psychopathology

Mental health disorders are inherently dynamic. From the developmental processes that shape vulnerability, to the onset and presentation of symptoms, to the course of illness and treatment responsiveness, perturbations to neural and behavioral systems unfold across time in ways that remain poorly understood. A deeper understanding of these dynamics will both inform mechanistic insights and clinical applications.

Our mini-symposium features scientists leveraging computational cognitive neuroscience methods to study development and illuminate the dynamics underlying the origin, emergence, presentation, course, and treatment of mental health disorders.

Date: Sunday, August 2, 2026

Location: Hess Center for Science and Medicine, The Mount Sinai Hospital, New York

Registration: Free but please do sign up because we may have to give a list of registrants to a security guard.

Link for details and registration: https://sites.google.com/view/forksintheroad

Beyond curated datasets: Learning representations from children’s everyday experiences

A central goal of cognitive computational neuroscience is to understand how structured neural and behavioral representations emerge from everyday, real-world experience. Yet most current models are trained and evaluated on curated datasets — collections of images, videos, and text disconnected from the temporal and embodied nature of how we actually experience the world.

Models trained on curated datasets achieve striking accuracy in predicting neural and behavioral responses to other curated datasets, but they often fail when asked to learn from, or generalize to, more naturalistic data. This satellite event highlights new methods for characterizing the learning environment available to young children, and new modeling approaches that can learn from these messy yet structured data.

This workshop will explore the idea that moving beyond curated datasets is essential to improve our understanding of human learning.

Date: Sunday, August 2, 2026

Location: Hess Center for Science and Medicine, The Mount Sinai Hospital, New York

Link for details and registration: https://vislearnlab.github.io/ccn-satellite-egocentric-learning/

Modeling and Understanding Human Brain Computation at Scale

Recent advances in deep learning and improvements in the quantity and quality of available human brain-activity data (including functional MRI, EEG, MEG, and intracranial recordings) have made it possible to build accurate encoding models of the human brain that can predict neural activity for new visual and auditory stimuli in individual people, even with generalization to new individuals. In parallel, recent decoding models leverage prior information from generative multimodal models to extract rich perceptual and semantic content from brain activity with increasing fidelity. It remains unclear, however, how these technical advances can best be translated into theoretical advances (a better scientific understanding of human brain computation) and impactful applications for the benefit of humanity.

One important goal is to build human brain foundation models that are constrained simultaneously by rich stimulus data, large-scale diverse brain-activity data, and task performance requirements, so as to capture the computations performed by the human brain. This satellite event "Modeling and Understanding Human Brain Computation at Scale" brings together researchers who build neural network models that capture shared structure in neural responses across the human population at scale and use the models to drive theoretical progress on the computations underlying human cognition and perception. A central theme is methodology: what mapping functions, architectures, and training regimes achieve strong generalization and enable interpretation? The event aims to foster dialogue between those collecting and modeling large-scale human brain data and those asking what such models can tell us about how the brain works and how human brain foundation models might be applied for human benefit.

Date: Sunday, August 2, 2026

Location: Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University, NYC

Registration: Free but please do sign up because we have a limited capacity and need to give a list of registrants to the security.

Link for details and registration: https://kriegeskorte-lab.github.io/ccn-satellite-human-brain-foundation-model/