Netherlands

What makes an explanation seem insightful? Prior work shows that including information from a lower level of explanation (reductive information) makes circular explanations appear more insightful. We suggest that this is in part because these circular explanations are pragmatically instructive: they suggest at what level of description the phenomenon should be explained. In Study 1, we show that even single sentence circular explanations appear more insightful with the inclusion of reductive information. In Study 2, we find that rating circular explanations with reductive information as insightful correlates with rating them as helpful with searching for explanatory information and with narrowing down which mechanisms an explanation should address. We also provide preliminary evidence that knowledge of the propositional content of the tautology is not the sole effect driving these perceptions.

**Authors:**

Monia D&#39;Angiò: Sapienza University of Rome; Salvatore Gaetano Chiarella: International School for Advanced Studies, SISSA; Luca Simione: Università degli Studi Internazionali; Chiara Saracini: Universidad Católica del Maule; Antonino Raffone: Sapienza University of Rome; Enrico Di Pace: Sapienza University of Rome

CogSci 2024

How to measure observational implicit learning of complex sequences: a novel paradigm involving rapid visual presentation and serial reaction time task

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

What makes an explanation seem insightful? Prior work shows that including information from a lower level of explanation (reductive information) makes circular explanations appear more insightful. We suggest that this is in part because these circular explanations are pragmatically instructive: they suggest at what level of description the phenomenon should be explained. In Study 1, we show that even single sentence circular explanations appear more insightful with the inclusion of reductive information. In Study 2, we find that rating circular explanations with reductive information as insightful correlates with rating them as helpful with searching for explanatory information and with narrowing down which mechanisms an explanation should address. We also provide preliminary evidence that knowledge of the propositional content of the tautology is not the sole effect driving these perceptions.

**Authors:**

Monia D'Angiò: Sapienza University of Rome; Salvatore Gaetano Chiarella: International School for Advanced Studies, SISSA; Luca Simione: Università degli Studi Internazionali; Chiara Saracini: Universidad Católica del Maule; Antonino Raffone: Sapienza University of Rome; Enrico Di Pace: Sapienza University of Rome

poster

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was an in-person meeting held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands at the Postillion Hotel & Conference Centre.

**ON-DEMAND PROGRAM ACCESS AFTER THE CONFERENCE** 
Recordings of the invited program are now available. You can access them by clicking on the 'Schedule' icon on the left. Select view by week and navigate to the day and time slot of the recording you wish to view. Click on the time slot to access the recording.

Recordings available (click on each recording to view):

**Thursday, July 25** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Morgan Barense on Enhancing real-world event memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/17997/lecture/99084-dynamics-between-minds-and-the-environment) 
1000: [Gleitman Award Winner Isabelle Dautriche on Language Foundations: Insights from acquisition, communication, cognition, and more](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18000/lecture/99085-gleitman-talk) 
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
1700: [Rumelhart Prize Presentation Speaker Alison Gopnik on Exploit, explore, empower: Three ages and three intelligences](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18028/lecture/99161-rp1-rumelhart-prize-presentation) 

**Friday, July 26** 
0900: [C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize Keynote Speaker Kia Nobre on Focusing in memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18035/lecture/99162-hp1-c-l-de-carvalho-heineken-prize-keynote-address) 
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture) 
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture) 
1745: [Keynote Speaker Andrea E. Martin on Neural dynamics encode the structure and statistics of language](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18077/lecture/99271-neural-dynamics-encode-the-structure-and-statistics-of-language) 

**Saturday, July 27** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Gregor Schöner on How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18083/lecture/99273-dynamics-within-the-mind) 
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture) 
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
<div style="position:relative;padding-top:0;width:900px;height:500px;"><iframe style="position:absolute;border:none;width:100%;height:100%;left:0;top:0;" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/cble/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>


**The Program Book can be downloaded [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yRVp1cBqRnAbdYi4GXWV_pZeyWNsRquv/view?usp=sharing).**

#### **Letter from the President**

Welcome to the 2024 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Rotterdam! CogSci 2024 brings together a large community of cognitive scientists who have traveled here from around the world, as well as a smaller group of remote presenters. I would like to extend an especially warm welcome to our first-time CogSci meeting attendees, and hope that 
their experience inspires them to join our future meetings for many years to come.

I want to thank this year’s conference co-chairs, Larissa K Samuelson, Stefan Frank, Mariya Toneva, Allyson Mackey, and Eliot Hazeltine, for putting together an amazing series of invited talks and symposia around the theme of Dynamics of Cognition. The co-chairs also deserve credit for handling a record-breaking number of submissions and producing a truly exciting conference program 

Beyond the invited talks and symposia dedicated to this year’s conference theme, I would like to highlight the presentations and events honoring the 
Rumelhart, Elman, Gleitman and C .L . de Carvalho Heineken prize winners, including the Rumelhart reception on Thursday. As you may know, we are recording all of the invited talks and symposia, and all prize-winners’ talks, and will be making this content available after the conference. 

The Cognitive Science Society relies on the volunteer efforts of our Governing Board members who work on matters related to our membership; conference policies; diversity and inclusion, international, and outreach initiatives; prizes and much more. We welcome interest from Society members who would like to become more involved in what we do. The 
Society is deeply grateful to Rick Dale and Andrea Bender, who serve as editors of the two Society journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science respectively. We especially acknowledge our editors’ generosity in donating their stipends each year to D&I and outreach efforts. 

This year’s Annual Meeting depends critically on the support of Marischal De Armond and his team at Podium Conference Specialists: Sharon Zwack, Cendrine De Vis, Sarah-Kate Burke, and Rachel Waller worked tirelessly to secure the venue and handled a multitude of logistical and organizational issues, from arranging coffee breaks and receptions to making sure that a huge number of posters fits comfortably into the available space. Finally, and importantly, I would like to acknowledge the Cognitive Science Society Executive Officer, Erica Wojcik, for managing the complex and ever expanding sphere of our Society’s activities.

I hope you enjoy this year’s meeting and the many different opportunities to engage with the vibrant community of cognitive scientists gathered here. I also hope you get a chance to explore the great city of Rotterdam with its many attractions, museums, restaurants and scenic views. If you’d like to talk more about our Society, or simply want to say hello, please stop by!

![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/3c66d0e21fff30e204df1138ffd15173.jpeg)

**Anna Papafragou** 
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

**CODE OF CONDUCT** 
By attending the CogSci 2024 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s [Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-6KkptF0Gn3ZYGJDlpqpwTdImw45Ng0/view?usp=drive_link).

**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY** 
The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education.

The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

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The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Belief polarization represents a puzzling and important dynamic in belief updating. There is growing awareness that belief polarization can be Bayesian. We provide pre-registered experimental evidence that beliefs can polarize when people receive conflicting testimony from two groups of sources if they have different beliefs about which group’s members have greater independence in terms of the factors which affect their testimony. We show this is predicted by a Bayesian Network model of belief updating.

**Authors:**

Martin Meyer: Yale University; Frank Keil: Yale University

Circular but Suggestive: Pragmatic Insights from Reductive Tautologies

After studying a list of items, recognition memory is usually tested with a single item, half from the list (targets, or OLD) and half not from the list (foils, or NEW). Models of
recognition have been applied to such data with great success. We ask whether the processes assumed in these models are used when two items are presented simultaneously, both studied, one studied, or neither studied, and participants are asked to choose the one more likely studied (2AFC), or asked to judge whether the two are both studied, one studied (and which), or neither studied (4AFC). Study lists contained 12 words, 24 words, 12 pictures, 24 pictures, or lists of 12 words randomly mixed with 12 pictures. Each of 83 participants gave responses in all these conditions. The choice probabilities were predicted well by the Retrieving Effectively from Memory model (REM) of Shiffrin and Steyvers (1997) using the 1997 parameter values (values that were used to generate predictions for single item tests) The results give strong support to the hypothesis that the primary basis for recognition judgments are the odds that an item is old, as specified by the derivations of REM.

**Authors:**

David J. Young: University of Cambridge; Lee H de-Wit: University of Camrbridge; Jens Koed Madsen: London School of Economics

Bayesian Belief Polarization due to Differential Perceptions of Source Independence

A detailed model of the outside world is an essential ingredient of human cognition, enabling us to navigate, form goals, execute plans, and avoid danger. Critically, these world models are flexible—they can arbitrarily expand to introduce previously-undetected objects when new information suggests their presence. Although the number of possible undetected objects is theoretically infinite, people rapidly and accurately infer unseen objects in everyday situations. How? Here we investigate one approach to characterizing this behavior—as nonparametric clustering over low-level cues—and report preliminary results comparing a computational model to human physical inferences from real-world video.

**Authors:**

Zainab Mohamed: Indiana University Bloomington; Constantin G. Meyer-Grant: University of Freiburg; Richard Shiffrin: Indiana University

REM (1997) Predicts Old-New, 2AFC, and 4AFC Recognition

How does the visual system adapt to reduced contrast? Participants read a row of white numbers against a static background that changed from black to white, from left to right. There was pervasive binocular disparity between the fixation points of the left and right eye as legibility decreased. Overall, the lines of sight crossed more frequently in front of the stimulus plane (“crossed fixation disparities”) than behind (“uncrossed fixation disparities”). The proportion of crossed fixation disparities increased systematically with reading difficulty. Absolute size of fixation disparity changed differentially in the two disparity types when contrast reduced, implicating different subsystems. We claim that hemisphericity provides the most insightful understanding of these behaviours. The viewer has flexible control of (a) advantaged contralateral projections from retina to cortex, (b) the size of the perceptual window, and (c) binocular fusion. Thus, an apparent failure of the eyes to fixate precisely conjointly is revealed as an adaptation of embodied cognition.

**Authors:**

Pat Little: New York University; Todd M Gureckis: New York University

A nonparametric model of object discovery

In day-to-day life we often hold goals that are at odds from those of our social partners. When faced with situations where goals are misaligned, a person might choose to sidestep non-compliance by intentionally misunderstanding the meaning of their partner’s request (technically satisfying it by upholding the letter, but violating the underlying spirit). The use of intentional misunderstandings, or loopholes, relies on the integration of complex social cognitive skills such as language understanding, rational planning, and goal alignment. In this work, we surveyed parents to study the emergence, extent, and scope of loophole behavior in childhood among autistic and non-autistic children. Loophole engagement emerged significantly more often among autistic children (N =241) than non-autistic children (N =425), however we did not find any differences in the developmental trajectory of this behavior between groups. These results build toward a comprehensive, neurodiverse picture of children’s understanding of intentional misunderstandings and introduce a novel method for exploring variance in autistic and non-autistic children’s social reasoning and decision-making.

**Authors:**

Ruomeng Zhu: University of Amsterdam; Mateo Obregón: The University of Edinburgh; Richard Shillcock: The University of Edinburgh

Reading in conditions of low contrast; The adaptability of binocular fixation behaviours

Whether travelling, playing games, or debugging code, any situation where an agent desires change can be framed as a problem. Despite this ubiquity, there is no unifying framework describing how people reason backwards when solving problems. We introduce AND/OR trees, which chain together subgoals and actions to attain them, as a way to represent this process. To investigate whether actions from AND/OR trees were predictive of human behavior, we conducted a study in which participants solved deterministic, long-horizon puzzles. We found that AND/OR trees provided a representation that is predictive of human behaviour. Next, we modeled search through these trees using a psychologically plausible, single-parameter search algorithm. We fit this model to the data of individual participants and found that it captures trends in summary statistics of human play. Our results show the promise of AND/OR trees as a representation for backward reasoning in problem solving.

**Authors:**

Kiera Parece: Harvard University; Sophie Bridgers: MIT; Tomer D. Ullman: Harvard University; Laura Schulz: MIT

Exploring Loophole Behavior: A Comparative Study of Autistic and Non-Autistic Populations

Large language models (LLMs) were trained to predict words without having explicit semantic word representations as humans do. Here we compared LLMs and humans in re-solving semantic ambiguities at the word/token level by ex-amining the case of segmenting overlapping ambiguous strings in Chinese sentence reading, where three characters “ABC” could be segmented in either “AB/C” or “A/BC” depending on the context. We showed that although LLMs performed worse than humans, they demonstrated a similar interaction effect between segmentation structure and word frequency order, suggesting that this effect observed in humans could be accounted for by statistical learning of word/token occurrence regularities without assuming an explicit semantic word representation. Nevertheless, across stimuli LLMs’ responses were not correlated with any hu-man performance or eye movement measures, suggesting differences in the underlying processing mechanisms. Thus, it is essential to understand these differences through XAI methods to facilitate LLM adoption.

**Authors:**

Jeroen Olieslagers: New York University; Zahy Bnaya: myWhatIf foundation; Yichen Li: Harvard University; Wei Ji Ma: New York University

Backward reasoning through AND/OR trees to solve problems

A field study examined how strongly the three categories of epistemically unwarranted beliefs: pseudoscience, conspiracist, and paranormal beliefs, can be predicted by cognitive ability in participants from several European countries. Each type of beliefs was significantly and strongly correlated with the remaining two types of beliefs, but only weakly related with cognitive ability, suggesting a minor role of reasoning and problem solving processes for forming and holding unwarranted beliefs. A role of cognitive ability for rejecting unwarranted beliefs was stronger in males than in females.

**Authors:**

Weiyan Liao: University of Hong Kong; Zixuan Wang: City University of Hong Kong; Kathy Shum: University of Hong Kong; Antoni B. Chan: City University of Hong Kong; Janet Hsiao: Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Do large language models resolve semantic ambiguities in the same way as humans? The case of word segmentation in Chinese sentence reading

In similarity comparisons, people often show a preference for one direction over the other. Bowdle and Gentner (1997) proposed the base systematicity account to explain this—namely, that people prefer similarity comparisons in which the more systematic item serves as the base. Results from a series of studies supported this account. However, the studies only covered literal similarity comparisons. The question of whether analogical comparison follows the base advantage pattern remained untested. Therefore, the present study investigated this question for analogical comparisons. We tested the prediction that a comparison will be preferred when the more systematic item serves as the base. This prediction was supported. We also found support for a further prediction: namely, that inferences were projected from the systematic to the less systematic passage. Further, these inferences spontaneously arose even when not requested. The overall results from these processes are consistent with the base systematicity advantage account.

**Authors:**

Jan Jastrzebski: Jagiellonian University; Adam Chuderski: Jagiellonian University; Hanna Kucwaj: SWPS University

Is Cognitive Ability Related with Rejecting Pseudoscience, Conspiracist, and Paranormal Beliefs? A Field Study

Theory of mind is often referred to as “belief-desire” psychology, as these mental states (belief, desire) are accorded a central role. However, extant research has made it clear that defining the notion of belief or characterizing a consistent set of key characteristics is no trivial task. Across two studies (N=283, N=332), we explore the hypothesis that laypeople make more fine-grained distinctions among different kinds of “belief.” Specifically, we find evidence that beliefs with matching contents are judged differently depending on whether those beliefs are seen as playing predominantly epistemic roles (such as tracking evidence with the aim of forming accurate representations) versus non-epistemic roles (such as social signaling). Beliefs with epistemic aims, compared to those with non-epistemic aims, are more likely to be described with the term “thinks” (vs. “believes”), and to be redescribed in probabilistic (vs. binary) terms. These findings call for a refinement of the concepts posited to underly theory of mind and offer indirect support for the idea that human psychology in fact features more than one kind of belief.

**Authors:**

Fanyi Mo: Northwestern University; Dedre Gentner: Northwestern University

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