Even though explaining the mental foundations of culture and the cultural foundations of mental life has always been one of the ultimate objectives of the collective social sciences, there seemed little hope of developing a natural science of culture until the recent interdisciplinary attempts coined cognition and culture. What sets the new approach apart is its focus on understanding the relationship between individual level cognition and social processes rather than settling for explanations that appeal to only one of these levels and allowing researchers from diverse traditional disciplines to productively communicate with each other and make progress on problems that transcend their disciplinary boundaries. Thus anthropologists, religious studies experts, marketing researchers, experimental psychologists, and computer scientists can work together to identify the ecological, cognitive and ontological factors that are critical to the spread of information and to identify the patterns of complex dynamics between cognition and culture. This emerging field has a number of international institutes, researchers, issues and methods but lacks a forum where researchers from diverse traditional disciplines can gather and discuss issues of common interest. Primary goal of this workshop is to provide such a forum.

The one-day workshop held in conjunction with the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will include presentation of invited papers as well as reviewed submissions. All submissions will be reviewed by at least two program committee members.