The 21^th SweCog conference will take place at the Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University, on October 26th – 28th.

SweCog 2026 is the annual conference of the Swedish Cognitive Science Society.

SweCog is committed to sharing and advancing knowledge and research within Cognitive Science, emphasizing a strong multidisciplinary approach. SweCog also aims to engage and support young scholars by promoting scientific accessibility, diversity, and inclusion, as well as supporting network initiatives and research dissemination among researchers in Sweden. 

The conference is free of charge and will be held at the Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University, from Monday, October 26th, to Wednesday, October 28th. Poster presentations and workshops will begin in the afternoon of October 26th, with additional poster sessions on the same day and talks on the 27th and 28th. The conference is organized in collaboration with the research arena of Trustworthy AI, Robotics and Social Technologies at the Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University.

The Ångström Laboratory is situated in the beautiful surroundings of Polacksbacken, about 2 kilometres south of downtown Uppsala. The visiting address is Regementsvägen 10, 752 37 Uppsala: https://www.uu.se/en/campus/angstrom-laboratory/visit-us

Here is some information about how to travel to Uppsala: https://destinationuppsala.se/en/good-to-know/travelling-to-uppsala/

Keynote 1: Peter Juslin

Returning to the Elusive Concept of Representative Design

Given the strong Brunswikian tradition at the Department of Psychology at Uppsala University, I take this opportunity to return to a discussion, evaluation, and elaboration of the elusive Brunswikian concept of Representative Design. The logic of the concept, as such, is often endorsed in principle, but its application often becomes lost in endless and less fruitful discussions on how to define and operationalize people’s “everyday environment”. I will briefly review applications of representative design in our previous research, as well as a in recent study on the transitivity of preferences. After discussing different interpretations of the concept, I will argue in favor of a more specific and technical definition of the concept of representative design than often assumed, which better meets the challenges of operationally defining the natural sampling population and with a (moderately) revised rationale.

Peter Juslin is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Uppsala University. His research focuses on human judgment and decision-making, including how people integrate information, make judgments under uncertainty, and combine intuitive and analytical forms of reasoning. His research has addressed topics such as overconfidence, probability judgment, multiple-cue judgment, and the idea of humans as “naïve intuitive statisticians.”
Peter Juslin has been a full professor at Uppsala University since 2003 and is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

https://www.uu.se/en/contact-and-organisation/staff?query=XX3971

Keynote 3: Linda Keeling

Photo by Viktor Wrange

The Emotional Lives of Animals

Linda Keeling is Professor of Animal Welfare at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and an internationally leading researcher in animal behaviour and welfare science. An ethologist by training, her research explores fundamental questions about animal cognition, emotion, motivation, and social behaviour, with a particular interest in how we can understand and assess animals’ positive emotional experiences and how early-life experiences shape later behaviour. Her work bridges fundamental research on animal minds and behaviour with major societal questions concerning animal welfare and sustainable development. She has published extensively in the field and leads the Centre of Excellence in Animal Welfare Science, an interdisciplinary network bringing together around 100 researchers.

Beyond her academic research, Keeling has played an influential role in translating animal welfare science into policy. She is an independent expert member of the EU Platform on Animal Welfare, has served on the European Food Safety Authority’s Animal Health and Animal Welfare Panel, and has chaired the Biology Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry and an Honorary Doctor at Linköping University.

Her research offers a fascinating extension of core questions in cognitive science beyond the human species: How can we understand what another individual perceives, feels and experiences when they cannot tell us in words?

Keynote 4: Katie Winkle

Designing Robots, Designing Society

What (or who) does artificial intelligence look like? Does it matter? What are “good” uses of artificial intelligence? Who decides? Robots are slowly moving from novelty to normal, increasingly found on our streets, in our hospitals, schools and homes. At the same time, social inequality is skyrocketing: polarisation is increasing, economic inequality is growing, gender equality is going backwards. Robots have the power to change our behavior, influence our thinking and shape how we interact with each other; will they help solve these problems? Or will they make everything worse? I’ll argue that designing robots is really an act of designing society, I believe they really can unlock more equal, joyful and meaningful ways of living, but only if we start thinking (and designing) differently.

Katie Winkle is a docent at the Uppsala Social Robotics Lab at Uppsala University and a leading researcher in human–robot interaction (HRI). Her interdisciplinary research brings together robotics and AI with psychology, design and the social sciences to explore how interactions with intelligent and autonomous systems can be designed to be trustworthy, socially sustainable and supportive of human flourishing. A central theme in her work is translating principles of trustworthy and responsible AI into the actual design of human–robot interactions. Her research spans participatory design, social influence and behaviour, feminist HRI, robot ethics, interactive machine learning, and the opportunities and challenges that emerge as robots become increasingly embedded in people’s everyday lives. Winkle is an active member of the international HRI research community. She has held several prominent roles at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, including that her work on Feminist Human-Robot Interaction received the Best Paper Award in Theory and Methods at HRI 2023. At Uppsala University, her research forms part of the university’s broader work on trustworthy AI and social robotics, connecting fundamental questions about human cognition, behavior and social interaction with some of the most pressing questions raised by increasingly autonomous and socially capable AI systems.

Important Dates

Preliminary programme

Monday, 26 October 2026
13:15-15:15 Workshop: From Brain Signals to Cognitive Claims

A Hands-on Workshop on EEG, AI, and Valid Cognitive-State Inference. This interactive workshop explores how EEG, behavioural data, self-reports, and contextual information can be combined to investigate cognitive states such as mental workload and fatigue, and how these measures can contribute to understanding broader cognitive outcomes such as decision-making, performance, and learning.

More info here.

Tuesday, 27 October 2026.

Venue: Sonja Lyttkens (room 101121), floor 1, house 10, Ångströms laboratory.

09:00-09:05 Welcome and Opening Remarks

09:05-10:00 Keynote 1: Returning to the Elusive Concept of Representative Design by Peter Juslin

10:00-11:00 Session 1: AI, technology and human thinking
Presentations by Mariam Marlen Mirström, Joel Parthemore, and Nils Dahlbäck.

11:00-11:15 Coffee Break

11:15-12:15 Session 2: Language production and speech perception
Presentations by Sonja Dahlgren & Axel Ekström, Yulia Kashevarova, and Anna Persson.

12:15-13:15 Lunch & Poster Session

13:15-14:15 Keynote 2: What Would Evolution Build? An Evolutionary Perspective on Associative Memory by Mats Lind

14:15-15:15 Session 3: Pragmatics, learning and linguistic context
Presentations by Caroline Arvidsson, Christoffer Forbes Schieche, and Maybí Morell Ruiz.

15:15-15:30 Coffee Break

15:30-16:50 Session 4: Interaction, participation and space
Presentations by Daniel Björklund-Flärd, Adwitiya Mandal, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, and Amos Pagin.

16:50-17:00 End of Day 1 and Dinner Information

Conference dinner (Pre-registeration required)

Wednesday, 28 October 2026
Venue: Sonja Lyttkens (room 101121), floor 1, house 10, Ångströms laboratory.

09:00-10:00 Keynote 3: Tentative title: The Emotional Lives of Animals by Linda Keeling

10:00-11:00 Session 5: Olfaction, semantics and aging
Presentations by Thomas Hörberg, Jonas Olofsson, and Leila Nathalie Rezazadeh.

11:00-11:15 Coffee Break

11:15-12:15 Session 6: Memory, perception and prediction
Presentations by Marius Boeltzig, Stefan Wiens, and Malina Szychowska.

12:15-13:15 Lunch & Poster Session

13:15-14:15 Keynote 4: Designing Robots, Designing Society by Katie Winkle

14:15-14:55 Session 7: Emotion, self and metacognition
Presentations by Oleksandra Osypenko & Alexandra S. Dylman and Alireza Ranjbar Khanhosseini.

14:55-15:10 Coffee Break

15:10-15:50 Session 8: Making Sense of Ambiguity: Context and Expertise in Human Cognition
Presentations by Richard Piech and David Pagmar.

15:50-16:00 Closing Remarks and End of SweCog 2026

Keynote 2: Mats Lind

What Would Evolution Build? An Evolutionary Perspective on Associative Memory

Abstract

Associative memory refers to the retrieval of stored information from partial or related cues, rather than from an explicit index. It is therefore a useful meeting point between psychological theories of memory and computational models such as exemplar-based representations, Hopfield networks, and linear associative memories.

Many computational approaches to associative memory involve important trade-offs. Classical Hopfield networks, for example, are attractor-based models of content-addressable retrieval, but their storage capacity is limited and they can develop spurious states. Similarly, linear associative memories offer mathematical simplicity and potential biological relevance, but their performance can be constrained by interference, representational overlap and capacity limitations. However, recent developments, including modern Hopfield networks and new approaches to ensembles of optimal linear associative memory banks, suggest that some or most of these limitations can be substantially reduced.

If computational limitations alone do not determine which model is most appropriate, what other principles should guide model selection in psychological research? In this talk, I will argue that evolutionary considerations provide one useful source of constraints. Different memory architectures imply different trade-offs among storage capacity, robustness, generalization, interference, and flexibility. Considering the adaptive problems that ancestral organisms had to solve over evolutionary time may therefore help us identify a small set of computational architectures that are plausible candidates for modeling memory in humans and other animals.

Mats Lind is Professor Emeritus in Human-Computer Interaction at the Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University. His research has focused on human perception and cognition, particularly visual perception, spatial cognition, and the interaction between perceptual processes and technology. His work spans cognitive science and human–machine interaction, with a longstanding interest in how humans perceive, interpret, and interact with their environment.

https://www.uu.se/en/contact-and-organisation/staff?query=XX2868