ASSC 30 Brings the Science of Consciousness to Beijing in June 2027
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness holds its 30th annual meeting, ASSC 30, at the Beijing International Convention Center on June 16-19, 2027. The society’s announcement names Sheng He of the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, as local organizing committee chair and Qiufang Fu of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, as co-chair, with details to follow on the ASSC 30 page. It is the society’s first meeting in China and its first in Asia.
The direct significance for consciousness science is geographic and institutional. The field’s founding society, which since 1997 has anchored the empirical study of consciousness in North America and Europe, will hold its anniversary meeting at the two CAS institutes where much of China’s consciousness and perception research is housed. Whoever attends will see the field’s largest empirical community expand its center of gravity.
What ASSC is and what the anniversary meeting inherits
The ASSC promotes rigorous research and coordinates annual conferences directed at the nature, function, and underlying mechanisms of consciousness, drawing cognitive scientists, physicians, neuroscientists, and philosophers. Its thirtieth meeting lands in a decade when the field’s own house has been put in order by adversarial testing, and the anniversary program will inherit the results. The COGITATE adversarial collaboration tested IIT and global workspace theory against their own preregistered predictions with neither surviving intact, and the adversarial phase-two work continues. The theory-testing culture ASSC meetings now carry is a product of exactly that decade.
The society also runs the James Prize and publishes its journal with Oxford University Press, and its recent meetings have grown an AI-consciousness track from a handful of posters to dedicated sessions. The 2026 meeting cycle this site covered, ASSC 29 in Santiago de Chile, showed the pattern, and the Beijing meeting is positioned to scale it.
The people running it
Sheng He, born 1964, built his career on the neural basis of human vision, visual attention, and visual awareness, first at the University of Minnesota and now also at the CAS Institute of Biophysics. His laboratory’s signature results established what survives when a visual stimulus is blocked from awareness, adaptation to invisible patterns and deep processing during binocular suppression, work that anchored the dissociation between cortical processing and awareness in the vision literature. His profile page carries the details, and his researcher profile on this site tracks his coverage.
Qiufang Fu, at the CAS Institute of Psychology and the State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, works on visual attention and perceptual learning, the experimental study of how observers select among competing perceptual representations. Her researcher profile on this site tracks hers. The pairing is deliberate, the two institutes that house China’s perception and cognition research are exactly the hosts a consciousness meeting in Beijing would want, and both co-chairs are experimentalists rather than philosophers, which sets the meeting’s expected register.
What a Beijing meeting changes
Three concrete things follow. First, the program will draw the Chinese vision and consciousness community into the society’s proceedings at scale, a shift because China’s consciousness research has run largely in parallel venues. Second, the anniversary meeting is where the field’s theory-testing era will be assessed from a vantage point outside the IIT-versus-GNW bloc that dominated the last decade. Third, for the AI-consciousness question this site tracks, the meeting arrives as the field’s measurement conversation, from the perturbational complexity index to machine-side indicator proposals, becomes the main event rather than a poster session.
A preview of the program will run here once the society publishes sessions and speakers, following the pattern of the CS26 San Diego coverage, the TSC 2026 recap, and the MoC7 Copenhagen recap, which together form this site’s conference-record collection. The flagship overview of AI consciousness research tracks where the field’s institutional map now extends.