Netherlands

CogSci 2024

Evolution of plasticity and learning

Recent years have given rise to breathtaking advances in genomics, nano-technology, and computation. These fields continue to evolve rapidly, with applications across nearly all biological disciplines. In this conference, we aim to showcase the ‘next-generation’ of genomic methods and technologies, and in particular to provide a platform for junior faculty to present recent discoveries and innovations. This virtual conference will feature advances in both computational and experimental methods, including single cell analysis, genetic engineering, population genetics, and statistical and deep learning. 

The meeting will take on September 27-28 from 10:00AM-5:30PM EDT, and we will release a detailed agenda prior to the conference.

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that enables us to offer open and free registration for Next-Generation Genomics 2021.

**Registration is free and open to all attendees**. Please use [this link](https://ngg2021reg.paperform.co/) to register and reserve your attendance at the conference.



Free registration

Next-Generation Genomics 2021

This conference will feature advances in both computational and experimental methods, including single cell analysis, genetic engineering, population genetics, and statistical and deep learning.

invited talk

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.

Cognitive science research has far-reaching implications, but many graduate students are trained solely for tenure-track faculty positions. Academic training develops a wide range of skills in behavioral research, literature  reviewing, data analysis, scientific publishing, grant writing, teaching, and student mentorship. These skills have direct application in many other careers, but training within academia typically neglects to address how
these skills translate to other work environments and career paths. As growth in the number of doctoral trainees continues to outpace permanent academic positions (Kolata, 2016; Larson et al., 2013; Lederman, 2016), more doctoral recipients have been seeking employment beyond faculty positions and academia (National Science Board, 2018).
Those who are interested in exploring alternative career paths may not know where to turn for guidance. Our goal in this professional development workshop is to offer such guidance and an opportunity to network with scholars in similar situations.

Career Paths Beyond the Tenure track for Cognitive Scientists

In-context learning refers to the ability of a neural network to learn from information presented in its context. While traditional learning in neural networks requires adjusting network weights for every new task, in-context learning operates purely by updating internal activations without needing any updates to network weights. The emergence of this ability in large language models has led to a paradigm shift in machine learning and has forced researchers to reconceptualize how they think about learning in neural networks. Looking beyond language models, we can find in-context learning in many computational models relevant to cognitive science, including those that emerge from meta-learning

In-context Learning in Natural and Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, the field of computer graphics has achieved its longstanding dream of photorealism: modern graphics algorithms produce images that are indistinguishable from reality. Much like art at the advent of  photography, then, computer graphics is now turning its gaze to the beholder: researchers are increasingly looking to cognitive science to engineer new modes of visual expression. Recent work has sought to apply insights
from cognitive science to a variety of traditional graphics topics: from taking a perceptual approach to perspective, to studying the theory of mind behind animation, to applying theories of abstraction learning to build tools for geometry processing.
At the same time, a wave of recent work in cognitive science has addressed fundamental questions about visual expression: for example, how humans understand and create ketches, shapes, and symbols. The field has also benefited greatly from tools and methods from computer graphics: differentiable rendering, physics simulation, and game engines have become indispensable in modeling human perception and intuitive physics. Recognizing this growing interdisciplinary exchange of ideas, we are proposing a workshop to begin building formal bridges between the cognitive science and computer graphics communities

Coggraph: Building Bridges Between Cognitive Science and Computer Graphics

Compositionality, or the ability to build complex representations from discrete elements,
is an essential ingredient of human intelligence. Compositionality enables people to
think productively, learn fast from limited experience, and generalize knowledge to new
contexts without re-learning from scratch. It is also essential in information processing
systems to efficiently represent structured data and has seen application in compression
and symbolic Artificial Intelligence (AI). Historically, the notion of compositionality played
a central role in linguistic theory and philosophy of mind. More recently, it is attracting a
surge of interest throughout the domains of cognitive science. Compositional processes
are leveraged for elucidating the nature of mental representations in cognition (Dehaene
et al., 2022), understanding the functional organisation of the brain (Agrawal et al., 2019),
or building Artificial Intelligence systems that are robust to changes in the environment
(Hupkes et al., 2020).

Compositionality in Minds, Brains and Machines: a unifying goal that cuts across cognitive sciences

Like any science, cognitive science rests upon a set of conceptual foundations.
Traditionally, cognition has been compartmentalized into distinct processes such as
perception, memory, attention, emotion, cognitive control, language, and others. Further,
the disciplines studying these different constructs have developed their own conceptual
systems. For example, emotion science studies anger, fear, and happiness, whereas
memory research has articulated varieties such as long-term, short-term, working, and
episodic memory. These conceptual systems serve as key scientific tools, influencing
processes from the development of new measurement instruments and deciding on
which experiments to conduct to developing new theories and communicating results
(Feest, 2010; Dubova & Goldstone, 2023). Although critically important for scientific
progress, these concepts, often stemming from the folk taxonomies or the perspectives
of early visionaries, have not always been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. To address
these issues, cognitive scientists are beginning to critically re-evaluate and possibly
reframe the conceptual underpinnings of cognitive disciplines (e.g. Cisek, 2019; Poldrack
et al., 2011; Musslick et al., 2020), yet such efforts often lack strategic direction and widely
diverge in their methodological ways of approaching the task.

Improving Concepts in Cognitive Science

We have a simple thesis: the relationship between academic and industry-based
cognitive science is broken, but can be fixed. Over the last few decades, there has
been a huge increase in the representation of cognitive science in industry. Beyond
just machine learning, businesses are increasingly interested in human behavior and
cognitive processes. Large proportions of our Ph.D. students, post-docs, and even faculty
choose to go through a largely one-way door to corporate jobs in data science, behavioral
experimentation, machine learning, user experience, and elsewhere. Currently, people
who choose industry careers often lose their social and intellectual networks and their
ability to return to tenure-track positions, and valuable insights from industry about
memory, decision-making, learning, emotion, distributed cognition, and much more never
return to the academic community. We believe that deep, theory driven, theory building
work is being done in industry settings--and that the rift between the communities is
making our scientific work less effective than it could be.

Rapprochement, not Detente: How cognitive science and industry can get back to getting along, and make each other better along the way

The field of psychometrics has undergone substantial evolution over the past several
decades, both in terms of advances in methodology and improved software and hardware
for deploying new methods. Despite these strides, many of these developments have not
been integrated into the broader field of psychology, as highlighted by Embretson (2005)
and Borsboom (2006). Understanding and incorporating these psychometric advances
is crucial to enable cognitive scientists to address growing concerns about validity
and reliability, as well as to develop robust theoretical frameworks for understanding
cognition.

Using Psychometrics to Improve Cognitive Models and theor

Join our discussion group as we explore the dynamics of how human cognition
interacts with AI, focusing on ChatGPT-like services. Our discussions will
examine both the facilitative and disruptive roles of AI in learning and
creativity.
Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, is becoming increasingly prominent in
academic and professional environments, providing tools for automation,
writing, and coding assistance. While these tools offer significant benefits,
concerns are growing about their impact on our ability to acquire and develop
skills and knowledge. Recent research indicates that AI can both support the
acquisition of new skills and disrupt traditional learning processes.
Our aim is to bring together researchers with diverse perspectives to discuss
these key questions:
#CogSci2024 71
PROGRAM SCHEDULE
Under what conditions is AI an effective tool for facilitating learning?
What are the potential pitfalls where AI disrupts learning and hinders skill
development?
We would be especially happy to have participants with relevant experience
who are ready to share their insights during the discussion. Regardless of your
experience or expertise on the topic, you are most welcome to join, learn, and
discuss.

Ai and Cognition: Transformative Tool or Disruptive Force?

The human mind is an information processing system that reveals irreducible
complexity and emergent properties – including the phenomena of dreams.
Dreams are flows of subjective experience during REM sleep that exhibit highly
random and generative content that differ greatly from wakeful consciousness.
Various theories attempt to capture the biological function of dreams,
including offline memory processing, emotional regulation, and learning.
We posit that computationally replicating the essential features of dreams
may reveal insights into the cognitive/neural mechanisms that give rise to
dreaming — as well as consciousness and intelligence. We are interested in
leading a guided discussion that explores the following: (1) the application of
an information-theoretic perspective to the causes and effects of dreams; and
(2) the process of developing an artificial intelligence that is able to dream.

Can Robots Dream?

This affinity group is initiated by members of the International Association
for Cognitive Science, Japanese Cognitive Science Society, Korean Society
for Cognitive Science, and cognitive science researchers in Hong Kong and
Australia. We seek to engage cognitive science researchers and societies in
the Asian-Pacific region at CogSci 2024. Through this affinity group, we aim
to provide networking opportunities to strengthen research exchange and
collaboration, to share experience in community building, to promote cognitive
science research in the region, and to provide mentorship opportunities to
young cognitive scientists or those who are interested in pursuing cognitive
science research. We also aim to initiate regular meetings or other forms
of research exchange in the future to take advantage of the geographical
closeness.

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