Welcome to the CSA conference!




We would like to invite you to the Cognitive Science Arena (CSA).

Our aim is to set a conference where young researchers can present their work in a friendly and cooperative environment with the audience challenging him/her in a fruitful debate. The goal of CSA is to provide a competent and useful “boot camp” for anyone how would like to a) practice the skills of giving a talk or discussing a poster, and b) develop his/her research based on suggestions from the audience. Along this line, highly innovative research ideas are encouraged as well as "in progress" research.


The key-ideas of the CSA are the following:
  1. papers by young scientists only without a full-term position (master students, PhD students and post-doctoral students, researchers with a fixed-term contract...);
  2. long time for each speaker: 15 minutes talk + 10 minutes discussion;
  3. "You will never talk alone": poster-session with dedicated time for each poster;
  4. "Short-talks for posters": Poster presenters are also asked to prepare a three-minute talk (with PowerPoint-like presentations) that summarizes and introduces the audience to the content of the poster;
  5. "Verba volant, scripta manent" (aka, several anonymous reviewers): attendees can write comments, criticisms and suggestions to the speaker, via paper and pencil. Comments are delivered to the speaker at the end of the talk (or poster) session;
  6. PADLET: Starting from 2018 edition at CSA we use padlet. Padlet is a virtual blackboard where you can write (anonymously or not: you decide!) questions, comments, criticisms, hurray, etc. while the speaker is giving his/her talk;
  7. in progress and high-risk research is also welcome!
  8. Still running!... Submitted abstracts can span from simple ideas to “under review”. Papers with a DOI cannot be accepted (unless the DOI was assigned in the time window spanning from abstract's deadline to the dates of the conference).

The conference will be held in Brixen-Bressanone (Italy), on February 5-7th, 2026.