United States

This paper presents a formal account of causal explanation, grounded in a theory of conversational pragmatics, and inspired by the interventionist idea that explanation is about asking and answering what-if-things-had-been-different questions. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the account, relative to previous accounts, by showing that widely recognized &quot;explanatory virtues&quot; emerge naturally, as do subtle empirical patterns concerning the impact of norms on causal  judgments. An extended version of the paper with further details can be found here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03732

CogSci 2025

Toward a Formal Pragmatics of Explanation

computational modeling

psychology

causal reasoning

philosophy

pragmatics

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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#### About

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.

#### Our History 

* **Society Creation**<br>
The Society was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts in 1979. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. 
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* **Conference Creation**<br>
The first conference on cognitive science was held at La Jolla, California in August, 1979, and has occurred annually since then. The proceedings of each conference are published, and those from most years are available through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The annual proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference represent a major source of information on new work and new ideas in the scientific study of thinking. In 1990, the Society, with help from an anonymous donor, established the David Marr Prize for the best student paper at each annual meeting.
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* **Journal Creation**<br>
The Journal, Cognitive Science, began publication in 1976, and is now published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Executive Editor is currently Richard P. Cooper of Birkbeck, University of London, and there are 18 Associate Editors and a 30-member editorial board. It serves as the premier outlet for research reports that intersect two or more disciplines. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society. The Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society voted in late 2006 to found a new journal, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). The Editor in Chief is Wayne Gray, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The journal seeks to fill a niche not occupied by Cognitive Science Journal or other cognitive science journals. Membership in the Society includes a subscription to Cognitive Science and TopiCS. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society.
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#### Code of Conduct

By attending the CogSci 2025 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s **[Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ChPuihLy6jE_BWqfO7J2KKgX35JW2zsM/view?usp=sharing)**.
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The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

This paper presents a formal account of causal explanation, grounded in a theory of conversational pragmatics, and inspired by the interventionist idea that explanation is about asking and answering what-if-things-had-been-different questions. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the account, relative to previous accounts, by showing that widely recognized "explanatory virtues" emerge naturally, as do subtle empirical patterns concerning the impact of norms on causal  judgments. An extended version of the paper with further details can be found here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03732

poster

Existing research has drawn parallels from the comprehension of text to the comprehension of source code. In this study, we attempt to develop this analogy by positing and testing a notion of code cohesion, analogous to text cohesion. We also attempt to extend a known effect in text comprehension research, the reverse cohesion effect, to code contexts. Our findings provide some corroboration for code cohesion, but fail to find robust evidence for a reverse cohesion effect. This reinforces similarities between text and code comprehension but also suggests that everyday comprehension processes of code and text  might differ in meaningful ways.

Can We Extend the Reverse Cohesion Effect to Programming Contexts?

The increasing integration of large language models (LLMs) based conversational agents into everyday life raises critical cognitive and social questions about their potential to influence human opinions. Although previous studies have shown that LLM-based agents can generate persuasive content, these typically involve controlled English-language settings. Addressing this, our preregistered study explored LLMs' persuasive capabilities in more ecological, unconstrained scenarios, examining both static (written paragraphs) and dynamic (conversations via Telegram) interaction types. Conducted entirely in Hebrew with 200 participants, the study assessed the persuasive effects of both LLM and human interlocutors on controversial civil policy topics. Results indicated that participants adopted LLM and human perspectives similarly, with significant opinion changes evident across all conditions, regardless of interlocutor type or interaction mode. Confidence levels increased significantly in most scenarios. These findings demonstrate LLM-based agents' robust persuasive capabilities across diverse sources and settings, highlighting their potential impact on shaping public opinions.

Can (A)I Change Your Mind?

Pragmatic accommodation is a key factor in maintaining
smooth real-life communication, yet it is largely overlooked in
pragmatic reasoning models such as the Rational Speech Act
(RSA) model. The current study explores ways of extending
the basic RSA model: revising the listener’s belief of common
ground, adjusting the listener’s belief of speaker rationality,
and doing both simultaneously. We evaluated model
predictions for utterances varying in utility levels (i.e., how
useful an utterance is for state updating) and sentence
polarities. We find that (i) contra prior findings, low utility does
not always trigger the expected extra inferences, but high utility
does, (ii) higher utility is associated with higher speaker
rationality, and (iii) our combined model predicts that lower
speaker rationality and lower wonkiness co-occur. Theoretical
implications of these findings are discussed.

Irrational Speaker or Wonky World: Modeling Prior Revision and Prior Update

Some researchers have argued that visual representations in the periphery differ qualitatively from those in the fovea (e.g., Balas et al., 2009; Freeman and Simoncelli, 2011; Rosenholtz et al., 2012). Consistent with this proposal, He et al. (1997) showed that crowding in the periphery disrupts the ability to individuate features but doesn’t disrupt feature detection. We hypothesized that He et al.’s demonstration could be accounted for simply in terms of cortical magnification alone. We tested this hypothesis by presenting He et al.’s stimuli to a neurally realistic model of V1 (Heaton & Hummel, 2022) that incorporates cortical magnification but posits no other differences between foveal and peripheral early visual representations. The model’s performance captured He et al.’s findings, suggesting that cortical magnification alone is sufficient to account for the differences between foveal and peripheral visual perception.

Modeling the effect of cortical magnification on feature detection and individuation 

Why do we sometimes fall into repetitive negative thinking (RNT) patterns, such as rumination and worry? To address this question, I trained a meta-control model (Todd et al., 2008) on affective working memory (WM) content by providing a reward signal when items (representing thoughts) were gated into WM. The model still facilitated adaptive motor action, as in the original implementation, yet it also exhibited the defining characteristics of RNT. Specifically, its thought became repetitive (because it learned to selectively gate items into working memory); negative (because it persisted in, and only slowly extinguished, gating into WM negatively valenced  on-theme and distractor items, respectively); and difficult to control (because, after extensive learning, it had a high chance of selecting the most probable WM gating strategy, irrespective of the value of an exploration parameter). Germane to clinically relevant RNT, such as pathological rumination and worry, the model’s thinking was more unproductive when the valence of one thought sequence strongly biased the next one. This work helps to establish meta-control as a formal algorithmic framework for RNT. It may catalyze clinical research on RNT by providing a bridge to computational findings.

Repetitive Negative Thinking Naturally Emerges in a Model that Learns to Gate Affective Content into Working Memory

Successful innovation hinges on balancing exploring new ideas and exploiting existing ones. A rational innovator should be state-sensitive, effectively switching to exploitation when the best available idea reaches some standard. We tackle innovation with a discovery-by-recombination game under additive reward growth, and compare the optimal state-dependent policy with a state-independent policy. Our experiment reveals that participants made state-dependent decisions, exploring more in rounds with early successes, albeit being told of the same true success probability. In contrast, the optimal state-dependent policy switches to exploitation earlier. This suggests that participants' state-sensitivity may be driven by ad-hoc subjective probabilities. Participants also deviated from optimality through excessive exploration, switching multiple times between exploration and exploitation, and their switching points also differed from the theoretical optimum.

State Sensitivity in an Additive Discovery Game

Goals play an essential role in how individuals process visual information. Prior work shows that different explicit visual task goals, such as instructing participants to identify specific graph features, lead to distinct visual search strategies and eye movement patterns (Hosseinpour et al., 2024). However, little is known about how such goals influence attention and decisions when not explicitly guided. This study explores how explicit and implicit goals influence attention and decisions in stock market graphs. In three eye-tracking experiments, we investigate the impact of auditory instructions and implicit visual cues that guide participants to focus on either the highest or lowest dips in stock market trend lines. The auditory instructions are provided either explicitly, directing participants on where to look, or implicitly, by subtly guiding their gaze through descriptive scenarios about each company. Our findings suggest that attentional goals significantly influenced participants’ gaze fixation patterns and investment decisions.

Eye Movement Patterns Influence Investment Decision Making

The output of language processing is fallible and nonveridical, as illustrated by the meaning-based Moses Illusion: When asked “how many animals of each kind did Moses bring on the Ark?,” many people say ‘two’ even when they know the biblical story is about Noah, not Moses. Susceptibility to such semantic illusions (the failure to notice the semantic error) is often attributed to people creating detailed representations emerging from top-down processing over constructing representations bottom-up from linguistic input. We present three studies exploring whether presence of a second (non-semantic) error, such as a missing word or a typo, impacts detection of a semantic error. Our results suggest that presence of a second error distracts participants from the semantic illusion. Furthermore, our results do not provide clear evidence for the claim that noticing a non-semantic error would trigger a shift to deeper processing, suggesting that shallow processing may be a cognitive default.

Susceptibility to Semantic Illusions: Attentional Consequences of Other Errors

We present the Oscillating Field Perturbation (OFP) model, a quantum model that provides a quantitative account of the Yerkes-Dodson law concerning the relationship between arousal and performance. Inspired by neural models, OFP conceptualizes cognitive control as an oscillating field that perturbs a quantum system, and represents arousal as the ``gain'' induced by this field. By integrating OFP with the Multiple Particle Multiple Well (MPMW) framework, we demonstrate that OFP successfully explains how the shape of the Yerkes-Dodson law varies with task difficulty and familiarity, consistent with empirical findings. To the best of the authors' knowledge, OFP is the first model to provide a unified account of the empirical variations in the shape of the Yerkes-Dodson law.

A Quantum Model of Arousal and Yerkes Dodson Law

This study explored differences in children’s information seeking in the two exploration tasks aligned with proposed curiosity frameworks. One task provided an open-ended unlimited information seeking design assessing the frequency of exploration attempts across similar options; the second was a constrained information seeking design with limits on how much could be explored, focusing instead on what children chose among varying levels of uncertainty. Children’s information seeking did not relate between the two tasks, and children give different explanations for their motivation for seeking information that aligned with the different designs; in the open-ended task children’s exploration was motivated by more superficial and perceptual features, while in the constrained task they described desiring information and mentioned uncertainty and mystery. Potential implications of the results are discussed.

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