Netherlands

Phonological anticipation, the ability to predict forthcoming words based on phonological cues, plays a pivotal role in language processing (Brunellière et al., 2018; Ito et al., 2018). Although predictive language abilities have been observed in infants, the mechanisms and developmental trajectories within native Spanish-speaking populations remain underexplored. This study delves into the investigation of phonological anticipation in Mexican Spanish-speaking infants through the utilization of eye-tracking methodology. The objective is to ascertain whether infants across different age groups can anticipate phonologically related words within semantically restrictive sentences. To achieve this, auditory sentences such as &quot;La gallina pone... huevos&quot; (The hen lays... eggs) were presented, accompanied by visual stimuli that included both phonologically related (&quot;hueso&quot; - bone) and unrelated competitor (&quot;calcetín&quot; - sock). Results indicate that 18- and 24-month-olds did not exhibit anticipation based solely on semantics, necessitating the auditory presentation. However, 30-month-olds demonstrated phonological anticipation, signaling developmental changes.

**Authors:**

Alejandra Mitzi Castellón-Flores: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Armando Q Angulo-Chavira: Universidad Nacional Auntónoma de México; Natalia Arias-Trejo: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, UNAM

CogSci 2024

Unveiling the Path to Phonological Anticipation: Insights from Infants&#39; Eye Movements

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.

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**Thursday, July 25** 
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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) 
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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** 
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1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


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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 
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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 
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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 
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**Anna Papafragou** 
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

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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.

Phonological anticipation, the ability to predict forthcoming words based on phonological cues, plays a pivotal role in language processing (Brunellière et al., 2018; Ito et al., 2018). Although predictive language abilities have been observed in infants, the mechanisms and developmental trajectories within native Spanish-speaking populations remain underexplored. This study delves into the investigation of phonological anticipation in Mexican Spanish-speaking infants through the utilization of eye-tracking methodology. The objective is to ascertain whether infants across different age groups can anticipate phonologically related words within semantically restrictive sentences. To achieve this, auditory sentences such as "La gallina pone... huevos" (The hen lays... eggs) were presented, accompanied by visual stimuli that included both phonologically related ("hueso" - bone) and unrelated competitor ("calcetín" - sock). Results indicate that 18- and 24-month-olds did not exhibit anticipation based solely on semantics, necessitating the auditory presentation. However, 30-month-olds demonstrated phonological anticipation, signaling developmental changes.

**Authors:**

Alejandra Mitzi Castellón-Flores: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Armando Q Angulo-Chavira: Universidad Nacional Auntónoma de México; Natalia Arias-Trejo: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, UNAM

Unveiling the Path to Phonological Anticipation: Insights from Infants' Eye Movements

poster

We examine the role of referential contrast in the learning of homophone versus superordinate terms: when an unfamiliar word is mapped to a broad range of referents across learning instances, how do learners decide whether the word has distinct meanings or a single superordinate meaning? We hypothesize that learners can accomplish this via semantic contrast among candidate referents within the referential domains. Learners will be more likely to establish homophonous meanings when contrasting referents are from a neighboring category of the target, and more likely to establish a superordinate meaning when contrasting referents are from more distant categories. We also expect homophone learning to be more difficult because of their additional demands on learning and memory. Our predictions were borne out in a series of experiments and in a cross-situational model of word learning. Overall, this study offers new perspectives for how learners form hypotheses for novel word meanings.

**Authors:**

Daoxin Li: University of Pennsylvania; Christine Soh Yue: University of Pennsylvania; John Trueswell: University of Pennsylvania

Is it a bat or a thing? Referential contrast in the learning of homophones and superordinate terms

The current study used a real-time interactive “advisor-decider” task, in which advice given by one participant results in an onerous workload for another participant, to show that self-conscious affect based on performance in one domain shapes decisions to engage in prosocial behavior in an unrelated domain: Advisors that performed at or worse than the norm, in terms of giving incorrect advice, made more frequent subsequent charity donations. Intriguingly, when advisors were given social information about their performance relative to the norm, this pattern was reversed, such that advisors that performed worse than the norm made less frequent donations. We interpret this finding as reflecting a shift in the emotion driving the behavior, from guilt to shame. Consistent with this interpretation, trait measures of guilt proneness but not of shame proneness predicted an increase in both the probability and magnitude of donations.

**Authors:**

Lucila Arroyo: University of California, Irvine; Mimi Liljeholm: University of California, Irvine

Exogenous Self-Blame Modulates Charitable Giving

This study investigates the processing of structurally ambiguous relative clause (RC) constructions in Japanese by Persian-Japanese learners, examining the influence of their native language (L1) on second language (L2) processing. It challenges the universality of parsing strategies through a self-paced reading (SPR) task. The results indicate a preference for High Attachment (HA) and a stronger tendency towards NP-high when it's an animate noun, in both Persian and Japanese. Descriptive analyses further revealed a shift from Low Attachment (LA) to HA among native Japanese speakers, suggesting unforced revision. However, there was an absence of a clear animacy effect on their preference. These findings suggest parallel interactive mechanisms in sentence processing and the transfer of syntax and semantic information from L1 to L2. Moreover, the study underscores language-specific differences in sentence processing, emphasizing the impact of language dominance in cross-linguistic transfer and contributing to our understanding of bilingual sentence processing.

**Authors:**

Faezeh Zare: University of the Ryukyus ; Hideki Goya: University of the Ryukyus

Processing of Relative Clause Structural Ambiguity by Iranians' Japanese Learners - From the Perspective of the Effect of L1 and the Animacy of the Head Nouns on L2 Sentence Processing -

Exploration in sequential decision problems is a computationally challenging problem. Yet, animals exhibit effective exploration strategies, discovering shortcuts and efficient routes toward rewarding sites. Characterizing this efficiency in animal exploration is an important goal in many areas of research, from ecology to psychology and neuroscience to machine learning. In this study, we aim to understand the exploration behavior of animals freely navigating a complex maze with many decision points. We propose an algorithm based on a few simple principles of animal movement from foraging studies in ecology and formalized using reinforcement learning. Our approach not only captures the search efficiency and turning biases of real animals but also uncovers longer spatial and temporal dependencies in the decisions of animals during their exploration of the maze. Through this work, we aspire to unveil a novel approach in cognitive science of drawing interdisciplinary inspiration to advancing the field's understanding of complex decision-making.

**Authors:**

Umesh K Singla: Princeton University; Marcelo G Mattar: New York University

Temporal Persistence Explains Mice Exploration in a Labyrinth

Recent neuroscience studies suggest that the hippocampus encodes a low-dimensional ordered representation of evidence through sequential neural activity. Cognitive modelers have proposed a mechanism by which such sequential activity could emerge through the modulation of the decay rate of neurons with exponentially decaying firing profiles. Through a linear transformation, this representation gives rise to neurons tuned to a specific magnitude of evidence, resembling neurons recorded in the hippocampus. Here we integrated this cognitive model inside reinforcement learning agents and trained the agents to perform an evidence accumulation task designed to mimic a task used in experiments on animals. We found that the agents were able to learn the task and exhibit sequential neural activity as a function of the amount of evidence, similar to the activity reported in the hippocampus.

**Authors:**

James Mochizuki-Freeman: Indiana University; Md Rysul Kabir: Indiana University; Zoran Tiganj: Indiana University

Incorporating a cognitive model for evidence accumulation into deep reinforcement learning agents

Predicting Click-Through Rate (CTR) is crucial in product and content recommendation, as it involves estimating the likelihood of a user engaging with a specific advertisement or content link. This task encompasses understanding the complex cognitive processes behind human interactions with recommended content. Learning varied feature embeddings that reflect different cognitive responses in various circumstances is significantly important. However, traditional methods typically learn fixed feature representations, leading to suboptimal performance. Some recent approaches attempt to address this issue by learning bit-wise weights or augmented embeddings for feature representations, but suffer from uninformative or redundant features in the context. To tackle this problem, inspired by the Global Workspace Theory in conscious processing, which posits that only a specific subset of the product features are pertinent while the rest can be noisy and even detrimental to human-click behaviors, we propose a CTR model that enables Dynamic Embedding Learning  with Truncated Conscious Attention for CTR prediction, termed DELTA. DELTA contains two key components:

**Authors:**

Chen Zhu: Tsinghua University; Liang Du: IEG; Hong Chen: Tsinghua University; Shuang Zhao: Tencent; Zixun Sun: Tencent; Xin Wang: Tsinghua University; Wenwu Zhu: Tsinghua University

DELTA: Dynamic Embedding Learning with Truncated Conscious Attention for CTR Prediction

The current study examines the interaction between predisposed mood, perceptual processing, and induced mood using music. We conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to identify stimuli at global or local (G/L) perceptual levels with four different background music conditions, which had different valence and arousal ratings. We used BMIS to assess current mood and PHQ-9 and GAD-7 to assess depression and anxiety, and divided the participants into two groups: distress and no distress (encompassing both disorders). We found a main effect of background music on mood. However, the distress group showed an overall low mood. Further, we observed an overarching effect of predisposed mood, encompassing depression and anxiety, on individuals’ transient mood experience and perceptual task performance. Individuals in the non-distress group showed a larger global-precedence effect. The results are discussed in light of emotional reactivity theories and the theory of positive emotion.

**Authors:**

Manas Kabre: International Institute of information technology, Hyderabad; Priyanka Srivastava: International Institute of Information Technology, Hyd

Predisposed Mood and Music in Perceptual Judgement Task

Neural language models, particularly large-scale ones, have been consistently proven to be most effective in predicting brain neural activity across a range of studies. However, previous research overlooked the comparison of these models with psychologically plausible ones. Moreover, evaluations were reliant on limited, single-modality, and English cognitive datasets. To address these questions, we conducted an analysis comparing encoding performance of various neural language models and psychologically plausible models. Our study utilized extensive multi-modal cognitive datasets, examining bilingual word and discourse levels. Surprisingly, our findings revealed that psychologically plausible models outperformed neural language models across diverse contexts, encompassing different modalities such as fMRI and eye-tracking, and spanning languages from English to Chinese. Among psychologically plausible models, the one incorporating embodied information emerged as particularly exceptional. This model demonstrated superior performance at both word and discourse levels, exhibiting robust prediction of brain activation across numerous regions in both English and Chinese.

**Authors:**

Yunhao Zhang: State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, CAS, Beijing, China.; Shaonan Wang: State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, CAS, Beijing, China.; Xinyi Dong: Beijing Normal University; Jiajun Yu: China Agricultural University; Chengqing Zong: State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, CAS, Beijing, China

Navigating Brain Language Representations: A Comparative Analysis of Neural Language Models and Psychologically Plausible Models

Counterfactual statements are famously difficult to process, and so are negated sentences and infrequent clause orders. Here, we argue that their combination can ease much of the processing cost when these difficult constructions align to clarify what is being referred to, thereby reducing referential uncertainty. In Experiment 1, we tested how affirmative and negative counterfactual statements (e.g., If there had been (no) zebras, there would have been (no) lions) are interpreted using a web-based eye-tracking paradigm. We found that negation facilitates processing, particularly when a Question under Discussion is about the actual state of affairs. In Experiment 2, reversing the clause order resulted in easier comprehension. These results provide support for a model of incremental language processing that puts the construal of semantic representations front and center.

**Authors:**

Ebru Evcen: University of California San Diego; Eva Wittenberg: Central European University

Two Negatives Make a Positive: Reducing Referential Uncertainty through Negation and Order Reversal Eases Processing in Counterfactuals

While the ability of recursion is considered universally available, there are considerable cross- and with-linguistic differences regarding the rules for recursive embedding, which must be learned from language-specific experience. One proposal argues that the recursivity of a structure is learnable as a productive generalization from distributional information in non-embedded input, and adults can indeed use such distributional cues to acquire recursive structures in an artificial language. However, it is not yet known whether children can use distributional information in this way. In this work, we examine children’s distributional learning of recursive structures. We exposed children to non-embedded sentences in an artificial grammar, where we manipulated the productivity of the structure across conditions. At test, we found that children exposed to productive input were more likely to accept recursively embedded sentences unattested during the exposure phase. The results suggest that children can make use of distributional information to acquire recursive structures.

**Authors:**

Daoxin Li: University of Pennsylvania; Kathryn Schuler: University of Pennsylvania

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Is it a bat or a thing? Referential contrast in the learning of homophones and superordinate terms

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