Workshops

We are excited to announce three amazing workshops for Synapsium 2023! Remember that there are only limited spaces for each workshop, so be sure to register as soon as possible to get your favourite.

VR and the Noise of Reality: On designing VR experiments

Workshop host: Abele Michela

The advent of Virtual-Reality has been considered as a game-changing tool for social sciences and neurosciences. Thanks to its affordances, VR is expected to allow researchers to design testing environments that are more representative of real-life than standard computer based experiments. Meanwhile, VR is also expected to offer the same high level of control over the experimental parameters as a standard computer task. The present workshop aims to critically review those expectations, provide guidelines to avoid the most common pitfalls of VR design, and highlights some unexpected advantages of this technology.  

Making your Research Relatable

Workshop host: Frank van Caspel

Have you struggled trying to explain your research to friends and family? Have you found it hard to interest a general audience in your work? Then perhaps you’ve been doing it wrong! Maybe you have been trying to translate your findings into language anyone can understand. While that sounds like the right thing to do, getting your science across is not about translating: it’s about relating

Rather than trying to translate your science lingo into everyday words, what you must do is connect what you want to say to something the listener already knows. You must relate it to their frame of reference, for only then can the listener truly understand. Only then can they actually think about your work for themselves, and come to share your interest.

In this workshop we’ll be practicing the very best way of doing exactly this: crafting analogies! This powerful tool for explanation should have a prominent place in any scientists’ tool belt. During the workshop you’ll hear some inspiring examples and will be challenged to come up with some good ones for your own research.

Memory from an Embodied Perspective in the Animal Mind

Workshop host: Bas van Woerkum

Bas van Woerkum (Radboud University) is a PhD candidate in the philosophy of animal minds. He draws on ideas from 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognition and ecological psychology to reconceive the cognitive abilities of humans and other animals. He has worked and published on the topics of episodic memory, social cognition and anthropomorphism. In his workshop, you will learn to think about “memory” in an embodied and ecological way, by exploring how metaphors, experiments and technologies have influenced our concept of memory, and how these influences can distort our view of nonhuman animals.