Introduction
Media and communication sciences are placed within the domain of social sciences and are necessarily becoming an interdisciplinary field of research. Research on the relationships between media, cognition and culture are fully justified by the huge impact of traditional and new media and technology in individuals, societies and cultures, of which globalisation and the new forms of immediate interpersonal communication are good examples. Given this context, it must be agreed that the recent advances of cognitive sciences featuring the understanding of human cognition give rise to new perspectives and launch stimulating challenges to communication sciences in general and to media studies in particular.
Over the last decades, cognitive sciences have developed theoretical models that allow us the understanding of essential aspects of cognition, of language and of communication itself. For example, we know from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics that people find most categories meaningful in terms of prototypes, not in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Hence follows the development of typically polysemous radial networks that are grounded upon human experience. From neurosciences we know that the brain does not process visual information in a disembodied way, but instead maintains the perceptual topology and rebuilds image schemas. These offer coherence to radial categories and motivate metaphorical projections of more concrete domains into more abstract ones. It is known that we may conceptualise certain situation in alternative ways and that we do it by means of construal operations such as perspective, focal attention, prominence, abstraction and the figure/ground distinction, well known from studies in gestalt psychology. We also know that communication is not confined to an exchange of information about the world. It is rather a means of cognitively coordinating different perspectives from the subjects of conceptualisation (speaker and addressee), therefore taking into account other minds, ruling and influencing them. It has been recently argued that human cognition is to be understood as situated, synergic or social, being equally determined by social interaction and culture and therefore can not be reduced to neural individual operations.
The aim of this congress is to promote interdisciplinary research on the biological, cognitive, emotional and sociocultural basis of traditional and new media, regarding their impact on cultures, societies and individuals. The congress includes both the perspective of interpretation or critical analysis of the media discourses and representations and perspectives about their production, perception and assessment. We are particularly interested on the following topics: cognitive and cultural models of socio/cultural identities and in social, political, economic and scientific debates, cognitive and cultural models as covert ideologies; structures, cognitive systems and rhetoric in single and multimodal discourses; prototypes and stereotypes in categorization; conceptual metaphor, in its verbal, non-verbal and multimodal appearances; cognitive power of metaphor and metonymy; mental spaces and conceptual integration; gestalt perception; image perception, understanding, structure and meaning; interaction patterns established between verbal text and image; interpretation of multimodal text; preconceptual image schemas and mental imagery; attention attribution; perspective and intersubjectivity; methodologies and techniques of interpretation and production of the media discourses; interaction between embodied and sociocultural aspects of cognition and of communication.
The congress is addressing scholars and researchers from different fields in communication sciences, linguistics, semiotics, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, neurosciences especially interested in media studies. Scholars from communication sciences who are not yet familiar with the principles and analytical tools of cognitive linguistics, cognitive semiotics and other cognitive sciences are invited to learn more. Scholars from cognitive sciences are invited to expand their knowledge and research areas to the field of the media. This event will be the first international congress on communication sciences organised by the recent communication sciences nucleus of the Research Centre on Humanities and Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Portugal.
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