Movement Matters:
Towards new methodology for capturing experience in motion

We need no (...) study to convince ourselves that fundamental human commonalities lie by way of movement. We need only examine our own experience of movement

– Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, p. 195

We are in a continuous movement, in coordination with others. A minute change in this coordination may mean an abrupt change in our feelings, even without our knowledge as to why this happened. A slight glance aside, a peculiar tilting of the head moves us to cheer our friend up. We step up and give them a hug, our movement changing the whole situation.

Yet, as psychologists and cognitive scientists, we are limited to methodologies which waste these rich realms of experience, reducing them to discrete constructs and measures, often divorced from the true human sensitivity in a given situation. We need new methods that treat movement in interaction and human experience as inseparable. Methods, which enable translating some qualitative aspects of experience into “data” that we can fit within the expected standards of the scientific process, pushing their boundaries, wherever necessary.

This year’s conference aims at finding such methods and expanding our awareness of the scientific process itself. We believe that our growing expertise in tracing and analyzing movement coordination should be complemented with principled approaches to studying first- second- and third-person experience.

We invite researchers who devote their work to studying motion coordination and/or experience using various quantitative and qualitative methodologies, such as:

• motion tracking,
• time series complexity measures (e.g., RQA, complexity matching…),
• audio recordings analysis,
• experiential interviews (microphenomenology, explication interview, interpretative phenomenological analysis),
• ethnographic methods for studying interactions,
• creating models with feeling
• ...

As always, we are very much open to a wide range of interpretations of this invitation, and we are keen on learning your methods, perspectives and discussing your projects and ongoing research. We will employ our whole bodies and persons to take your questions and dilemmas for a walk and talk them through.

We are happy to announce that our keynote speakers this year include:

• Sofie Pedersen (Roskilde University)
• Wim Pouw (Tilburg University)
• Hanne De Jaegher (University of Sussex) – online talk

Programme

Book of abstracts

The conference will take place October 23-26 2025 in the hotel Kalatówki, near Zakopane. We start with an evening session on Thursday and close the conference on Sunday morning. We talk science in the morning, walk during the day, and finish off with another round of short presentations.

The conference fee is 400 PLN. We offer full and partial grants for students and researchers awarded on a per-need basis. You can apply for funding in the application form.

Come and share your research results, doubts, questions, ideas, collaboration opportunities. During the stationary meetings and peripatetic ones (from Ancient Greek peripatētikós – “given to walking around”) senior researchers, post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students share their knowledge and draw inspiration for further work.

We all are active participants at this conference. There are two possible types of participation:

• Talk (15 minutes + 5 minutes discussion)
• Poster (with 1 minute teaser presentation)

The deadline for abstract submission is August 20th. Application form can be found here.

We will let you know about the results of your applications by September 10th.

If you have any questions, contact us at: lab.hill@psych.uw.edu.pl

The Peripatetic conferences on Cognitive Systems Modeling have been organized since 2010 by and for those who appreciate thinking and exchanging ideas while walking and those who, like many before, believe that the rarefied mountain air and the physical exertion bring our brains to another level of functioning.

Cognitive systems are defined through their ability to adapt to the ever-changing conditions of the environment. We observe such processes of adaptation on many different levels: from single cells and tissues, through regulation systems such as the immune system, to people operating on conscious level and whole social groups. The aim of the conference is to present recent research on cognitive systems from multitude of perspectives and methodologies, and to bridge gaps between different disciplines in order to develop common language as well as new methods and paradigms for modeling cognitive phenomena.

Among the participants of the previous editions of the conference were psychologists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, linguists, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, anthropologists, sociologists. No matter what is your discipline, what counts is your interest in cognitive systems, your openness to talk to others and your love for the mountains.