The 53nd annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society will be held in Toronto, Canada

                                                               May 31 to June 2, 2024

Beyond Dualism: Embodiment Perspectives on Development

Organized by Dor Abrahamson and Jeffrey Lockman.

Margaret Moulson, Local Organizer

Submissions for the 2024 Conference are now closed. 

The 2024 conference theme will examine Embodiment as an epistemological proposal that the mind is formatively shaped by and for physical interaction with the environment and that higher cognition should be theorized from that developmental premise. Specifically, the conference will showcase cutting-edge scholarship exploring how cognitive activity, such as judgment, language, and problem-solving, draws on perceptuomotor neural substrates that evolve ontogenetically through active engagement in socio-cultural material contexts. Theories of embodiment could perturb the fundaments of cognitive science, because by carving human experience at its phenomenological and ecological joints they upend traditional epistemological and ontological dichotomies, such as brain–body, internal–external, self–other, imaginary–actual, or concrete–abstract.

What might this mean for theories of cognitive development and, correspondingly, for educational research and practice? And what of individuals with diverse sensory, motor, and cognitive capacities? As we evaluate the potential impact of embodiment on developmental and educational research, we find ourselves in need of new instruments that enable us to track humans’ multimodal interactions with artifacts and each other, and coordinate among neural, physiological, sensorial, clinical, phenomenological, and ethnographic data to build coherent integrated accounts of teaching and learning processes. Collectively, the invited program will address these issues from infancy to adulthood, bridging behavioral, cross-cultural, ethnographic, kinematic, and neural methods.