Cognitive Science Meets Autonomous Mental Development

The 7th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL 2008) took place at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Monterrey, CA, from August 9 to 12, 2008. The Asilomar Conference Ground has been a place for some well-known conferences in U.S. history, with its natural beach surroundings dotted with rustic buildings with spacious rooms and other facilities. This year’s conference had financial support from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and technical coordination with the Cognitive Science Society. Like our previous meetings, ICDL 2008 was a truly interdisciplinary conference, with papers and posters ranging from computer science and engineering, machine learning, and robotics, to developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, with additional content in the fields of anthropology and linguistics, and the biological and neurosciences. The common theme was multidisciplinary efforts to understand complex dynamics of emergent cognitive and behavioral systems, in biological or artificial agents ⁄ systems. Attendees enjoyed cutting-edge talks from three outstanding invited speakers. Professor Richard Aslin of Rochester University discussed evidence and models of unsupervised learning by human infants and adults. Professor Terry Jernigan of UC-San Diego described recent breakthroughs in structural imaging of developing brains, and resulting insights into emergent changes in cognition. Professor Andrew Ng of Stanford described neurally inspired learning algorithms by which systems can discover complex structures. These talks were complemented not only by talks chosen by peer review but also by two reviewed