Topical focus: Language Acquisition August 17–28 2026; Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg https://www.analytical-connectionism.net/school/2026/ Apply by 17 April 2026 We are delighted to announce the 4th edition of the School on Analytical Connectionism. This 2-week course will focus on analytical theories of cognition, bringing together ideas from connectionism, cognitive science, and modern theories of machine learning. This course is appropriate for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in fields from psychology and neuroscience, to physics, computer science, and mathematics. This year we will discuss questions like: - How can structured linguistic knowledge emerge from learning? - What theoretical principles govern generalisation, compositionality, and representation in neural systems? - How can we move beyond empirical demonstrations toward mechanistic, mathematically grounded explanations of cognitive phenomena like language acquisition? The course will bring together neuroscience, psychology, and machine-learning communities, introducing participants to connectionist theories of higher-level cognition and psychology as well as analytical methods for neural-network analysis. Participants will work in teams, mentored by course lecturers and organisers, to develop novel research projects on topics related to analytical connectionism. Participants will present the research proposals in Week 1 and interim results at the end of the course. Confirmed Faculty: - Michael Biehl (University of Groningen) - Caroline Rowland (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) - Paul Smolensky (Microsoft Research & Johns Hopkins) - Marco Baroni (ICREA & Pompeu Fabra University) - Francesco Cagnetta (SISSA) - Alex Cristia (ENS & CNRS) - Bruno Loureiro (ENS & CNRS) - Kanishka Misra (UT Austin) - Isabel Papadimitriou (University of British Columbia) - Luca Saglietti (Bocconi University) - Asad Sayeed (Gothenburg University) - Larissa Samuelson (University of East Anglia) - Kenny Smith (University of Edinburgh) - Chris Summerfield (Oxford University) Organisers: SueYeon Chung, Erin Grant, Flavio Nicoletti, Stefano Sarao Mannelli, Andrew Saxe