The Next Annual Meeting - Aix-en-Provence 22-24 April 2026

We are thrilled to announce that the 8th Annual Meeting of the Society will take place 22nd-24th April 2026 at Le Cube, amU - Aix-Marseille University in Provence, France.

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The meeting promises three intellectually stimulating and fun days of science and culture, with an extremely exciting line-up in store.

We are delighted to reveal our four outstanding keynote speakers, whose work touches on topics dear to the society’s heart and aims.

Check back here regularly for ongoing updates.

Prof. Usha Goswami, University of Cambridge
Brain Beats: Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience of Rhythmic Language
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Prof. Helmut Leder, University of Vienna
Beauty as sensory pleasure?
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Prof. Patrick Lemaire, Aix-Marseille University
Mathematics across cultures: What can we learn about the role of culture on cognition?
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Dr. Daniele Schön, CNRS Research director, Aix-Marseille University
Music as window into language processing and rehabilitation
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We are preparing to accept the most important ingredient of all - YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS!

Abstract Submission opens on 24th November 2026

As attested by the diversity of our keynote presentations, we welcome submissions from the full spectrum of research interested in the relationship between cognition and culture in its many forms across domains including psychology, neuroscience, behaviour, linguistics and literature, visual art and music. Please spread the word among your interested peers and colleagues to help make this a fantastic meeting!

A call for submissions will go out shortly, but feel free to get ahead of the crowds and submit your abstracts for 20-minute oral or Poster presentations, from Monday 24th November. Submission will be open until 31st January 2026, we look forward to your contributions.

For an idea of what’s in store, take a look at our Meeting Archive

Paul Cézanne - Study of the Mont Sainte Victoire (1904-1906). Collection of the Musée D’Orsay, Paris.

Usha Goswami - Brain Beats: Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience of Rhythmic Language

Early linguistic experiences, particularly lullabies and BabyTalk, shape infant’s linguistic development across cultures and set children up for acquiring literacy. By describing her cross-language research programme, Professor Goswami will explain how children’s language development is rooted in rhythmic learning. Computational modelling of infant-directed speech (BabyTalk), nursery rhymes and child songs, story reading and metrical poetry across languages has revealed a shared acoustic structure based on amplitude modulation (loudness). Neural studies with infants and children (e.g. the Cambridge BabyRhythm project) further reveal how speech rhythms and brain rhythms are intimately linked, providing the key foundations for language learning and literacy.

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Helmut Leder - Beauty as sensory pleasure?

The history of psychological aesthetics develops from a debate in the 18th and 19th centuries about the interpretation and sovereignty of art and beauty. With Baumgarten and Fechner, psychology, this newly emerging science, sided with physiology and thus formed the core of a new social science orientation, a science of human beings. For Baumgarten, aesthetics was sensual pleasure and in modern empirical aesthetics is the psychological hallmark of beauty. To date, the evidence for this statement has been rather indirect; recently, we attempted to empirically test the central assumption that sensory stimulation makes us perceive beauty by conducting an MRI study to determine how sensual, aesthetic experiences differ from merely imagined sensual experiences. The question arises as to whether aesthetic experiences can similarly emerge through imagery or whether these complex experiences necessitate direct input into the sensory system. While slightly less potent, imagery is equally sufficient in evoking aesthetic experiences, and for highly vivid imaginations, evoked experiences even become behaviorally indistinguishable across conditions. Yet, representational similarity analysis reveals distinct neural patterns across conditions as the brain mainly encodes stimulus modality, even in areas canonically associated with aesthetic processing. Thus, although evoked experiences might be behaviorally identical across modalities during highly vivid trials, neural patterns differ substantially due to differences in modality, as evoked experiences are only marginally encoded.

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Patrick Lemaire - Mathematics across cultures: What can we learn about the role of culture on cognition?

Over 50 years of research has shown that culture shapes cognitive architectures and influences cognitive performance in a wide variety of domains, included mathematics. Influence of culture on cognition is modulated by a number of parameters (e.g., language, schooling, culture values) and is moderated by numerous participants’ characteristics within a given culture (e.g., age, personality, IQ). The issue then is how to account for these modulations and moderations? Above and beyond examining cultural differences in cognitive performance and changes in magnitudes of these differences as a function of several parameters, the field is ready to move beyond describing these differences so as to provide mechanistic accounts of the sources of cultural differences in human cognition. In this talk, I will propose to use a conceptual and methodological framework to characterize and explain cultural differences. This framework focuses on strategic variations underlying cognitive performance. After briefly describing the core fascinating cultural differences in different cognitive domains in general and in math in particular, I will present the main features of the strategic variations framework. Then, I will illustrate the usefulness of this strategic variation framework with data collected to address two specific issues. First, the data further our understanding of effects of age-based stereotype threat on cognitive performance. A second series of findings illustrate how cultural differences in effects of distraction on children’s math performances are mediated by strategic variations. The data are collected in the domain of arithmetic, but the findings and conclusions generalize to numerous cognitive domains.

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Daniele Schön - Music as window into language processing and rehabilitation

This presentation examines the relationship between music and language as interrelated cognitive and neural systems. Drawing on linguistic, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological evidence, it explores how shared mechanisms—such as rhythm, temporal prediction, and hierarchical processing—support both domains. Studies reveal overlapping cortical networks and oscillatory synchronization underlying the perception and production of musical and linguistic structures. Beyond theoretical insights, the talk highlights how music can enhance language processing and rehabilitation, improving phonological awareness, grammaticality judgments, and speech entrainment. Clinical findings from stroke, aphasia, and developmental language disorders demonstrate that rhythmic and melodic interventions promote neural plasticity and functional recovery. Overall, music serves as both a model and a therapeutic tool, offering a unique window into the brain’s capacity for communication, adaptation, and learning.

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