Netherlands

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are widespread and well-intentioned within progressive institutions. However, many such initiatives backfire because they diminish external perceptions of diverse hires&#39; competence. Across five preregistered experiments, we develop a novel theory: that statistical reasoning about candidate competence is clouded in DEI cases by existing priors and stereotypes, as well as mentalistic assumptions about selector intention. Supporting this, we find that people do make logical statistical inferences with uniform populations and random selection processes. However, as people receive more information about the population and the selection process, their decisions move away from optimality. This work will inform interventions to tailor DEI messaging. While it is difficult to entirely eliminate people&#39;s existing stereotypes and priors, it may be feasible to intervene on their statistical intuitions in response to DEI initiatives.

**Authors:**

Claudia G. Sehl: University of Waterloo; Ori Friedman: University of Waterloo; Stephanie Denison: University of Waterloo 

CogSci 2024

Inferences about social networks using domain-general reasoning

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.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are widespread and well-intentioned within progressive institutions. However, many such initiatives backfire because they diminish external perceptions of diverse hires' competence. Across five preregistered experiments, we develop a novel theory: that statistical reasoning about candidate competence is clouded in DEI cases by existing priors and stereotypes, as well as mentalistic assumptions about selector intention. Supporting this, we find that people do make logical statistical inferences with uniform populations and random selection processes. However, as people receive more information about the population and the selection process, their decisions move away from optimality. This work will inform interventions to tailor DEI messaging. While it is difficult to entirely eliminate people's existing stereotypes and priors, it may be feasible to intervene on their statistical intuitions in response to DEI initiatives.

**Authors:**

Claudia G. Sehl: University of Waterloo; Ori Friedman: University of Waterloo; Stephanie Denison: University of Waterloo 

poster

Neuro-Symbolic Models of Human Moral Judgment

Peak shifting is a key method to enhance the resilience of water supply infrastructure. Due to limitations related to the cost of smart meters, experimentally investigating the impact of a time-of-use tariff on inducing peak shifting in water usage has been challenging. Having experimentally introduced smart meters across 1,890 households, this study investigated behavioral responses to reduced water prices during off-peak hours (i.e., by increasing the relative cost of peak-time usage). This was achieved by implementing a pricing scheme offering a 60% discount from 23:00 to 05:59 and a 20% discount from 10:00 to 16:59. The results revealed significant changes in water usage behavior near the boundary between off-peak and peak times, suggesting a shift in water usage behavior towards the off-peak period. Moreover, a time-series analysis demonstrated peak shifting induced by off-peak price reductions. Furthermore, this study examines cognitive processing and its impact on altering water usage behaviors on an hourly basis. These findings suggest that reducing prices during off-peak periods can effectively induce peak shifting across a broad range of times.

**Authors:**

Aarthi Popat: Yale University; Yarrow Dunham: Yale University

“I’m going to choose a Hibble”: Social and statistical reasoning in DEI contexts

In syllogistic reasoning research, humans are predominantly evaluated on their capabilities to judge whether a conclusion necessarily follows from a set of premises. To tackle this limitation, we build on work by Evans, Handley, Harper, and Johnson-Laird (1999), and present two studies where we asked participants for possible and likely conclusions. Combined with previous data (containing necessary), we present a comprehensive dataset with responses for all syllogisms, offering individual patterns for all three argument types – a first of its kind. We discovered that likely serves as a middle ground between possible and necessary, paving the way to further investigate biases and preferences. Generally, individuals were able to handle the different notions, yet tended to interpret quantifiers in a pragmatic way, overlooking logical implicatures. Finally, we tested mReasoner, an implementation of the Mental Model Theory, and concluded that it was not able to capture the patterns observed in our data.

**Authors:**

Yutaro Onuki: Hitotsubashi University; Yurina Otaki: Hitotsubashi University

Off-Peak Price Reductions for Water Demand Management

This study investigates the interaction between semantic relatedness and goals or task on memory retrieval. We used varied tasks and concepts to explore how task influences how different kinds of semantic relatedness influences semantic processing. Our findings reveal a task-dependent interaction with semantic relatedness. Specifically, in similarity judgement tasks (experiments 1a and 1b), participants' ratings closely aligned with taxonomic relatedness, influenced by abstract visual and linguistic similarity dimensions. In discrimination tasks (experiments 2a and 2b), where participants distinguished a target from a semantically related distractor, visual characteristics explained a greater amount of variance. These results suggest semantic memory representations are dynamic and task-dependent, supporting theories of a distributed semantic memory system.

**Authors:**

Daniel Brand: Chemnitz University of Technology; Sara Todorovikj: University of Technology Chemnitz; Marco Ragni: TU Chemnitz

Necessity, Possibility and Likelihood in Syllogistic Reasoning

Universal constraints on word meaning apply to both lexical and logical words. Across languages, a well-known gap in the logical vocabulary is that 'not all’ is never lexicalized. This gap extends beyond determiners to the modal and temporal domains; e.g. 'not must' and 'not always' are typically not lexicalized (Horn 1973). The challenge is to explain this gap. The non-lexicalization of 'not all' has been explained as resulting from a cognitive bias against intrinsically marked meanings (e.g., Katzir and Singh 2013). Recent alternative accounts, however, have explained this same gap relying on considerations of communicative efficiency rather than cognitive markedness (e.g., Enguehard and Spector 2021). In a series of word learning experiments, we disentangle these views by testing whether learners are more likely to infer that a novel word means 'some' rather than 'not all' and whether this varies depending on the communicative needs in the context.

**Authors:**

Andrew Z. Flores: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Jon Willits: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Task-sensitive retrieval from semantic memory

Paired-associate learning is a classic paradigm addressing a most fundamental memory task: recalling examples of arbitrary associations between elements. One lesson is that semantics matters to this otherwise episodic task in that elaborative rehearsal connecting the words facilitates cued-recall. We ask whether two forms of semantic elaboration, inspired by higher-order cognition, can produce even better performance. Control groups performed ordinary elaborative study tasks (integrated imagery and compare/contrast) within a traditional paired-associate learning task. Experimental groups either: (1) completed a conceptual combination task requiring them to invent a novel concept aptly captured by the noun-noun pair; or (2) invoked relational cognition skills by predicating a propositional statement wherein the two concepts each fulfilled roles in a semantic relationship. Across three experiments relational predication showed a sizable advantage in cued-recall relative to controls; and additional evidence revealed a less robust benefit of conceptual combination. Implications for theory and application are discussed

**Authors:**

Mora Maldonado: CNRS; Ruizhe Zhou: ENS; Benjamin Spector: CNRS, ENS

An experimental assessment of the nall lexical gap

Bar graphs are commonly used graphs, but what do students infer about the data that created the bar graph? Previously, a drawing task revealed that a minority of students conflate mean bar graphs with count bar graphs and draw all data points within the bar of a mean bar graph (bar tip limit error, BTLE). The present study extends this literature by manipulating the instructional text for the drawing task, interviewing the participants on their drawings, and recording their drawings and drawing session for further analysis. While we did not see any differences in the BLTE rates across instructional conditions, we did see significant differences in their drawing explanations and drawn data distributions based on condition, and in their drawing explanations based on whether they expressed confusion and whether they committed the BTLE. We discuss possible explanations and their implications.

**Authors:**

Keith L Sherman: Binghamton University; Kenneth Kurtz: Binghamton University

Remembering better: A bridge between paired-associate learning and higher-order cognition

Previous research on perception of correlation of scatterplots used scatterplots as stimuli and asked participants to estimate or compare correlations of those scatterplots. This literature has shown a tendency for people to underestimate correlation in some correlation ranges. We flipped the task: instead of estimating correlation from visual stimuli, participants drew a scatterplot based on a given correlation: 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1 using 20 dots. Participants drew greater correlations for r = 0.25 and r = 0.5 (0.59 and 0.71 respectively), which is analogous to underestimating correlation in previous viewing tasks. Drawn correlations for r = 0, 0.75 and 1 were more accurate. The number of statistics courses taken did not improve correlation drawing accuracy in a strong or meaningful way. We discuss possible interpretations of these results and future directions.

**Authors:**

Lucy Cui: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Ching-Yi Wang: Academic; Yiwei Wang: University of California, Los Angeles; Peike Li: University of California, Los Angeles; Medha Kini: University of California, Los Angeles; Zili Liu: UCLA

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