United States

This study aimed to explore the relationship between ESL learners&#39; cognitive styles and personality types, focusing on how personality influences perceptual learning preferences and language learning strategies. Participants included 20 English majors and 58 Nursing majors in a Year 1 ESL course (62 females and 16 males). Data were collected using a structured questionnaire, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) test, and 40 items on learning styles and strategies. Results indicated that the most common personality types among English majors were INFP and ISFP, while Nursing majors frequently exhibited ISFJ and ENFP types. The least common types were INTJ and ENTP. Learning style preferences showed 37% favored reading/writing, 33% visual, 26% auditory, and 4% kinesthetic. Significant relationships were found between language learning strategies and introverted/extroverted personality types, though no significant gender differences were observed. The findings suggest that ESL instructors should consider these differences to enhance classroom dynamics and effectiveness.

CogSci 2025

The Impact of Personality Types and Cognitive Learning Styles on ESL Learners in Art and Science Programmes

language and thought

statistics

learning

language acquisition

survey

linguistics

education

This study aimed to explore the relationship between ESL learners' cognitive styles and personality types, focusing on how personality influences perceptual learning preferences and language learning strategies. Participants included 20 English majors and 58 Nursing majors in a Year 1 ESL course (62 females and 16 males). Data were collected using a structured questionnaire, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) test, and 40 items on learning styles and strategies. Results indicated that the most common personality types among English majors were INFP and ISFP, while Nursing majors frequently exhibited ISFJ and ENFP types. The least common types were INTJ and ENTP. Learning style preferences showed 37% favored reading/writing, 33% visual, 26% auditory, and 4% kinesthetic. Significant relationships were found between language learning strategies and introverted/extroverted personality types, though no significant gender differences were observed. The findings suggest that ESL instructors should consider these differences to enhance classroom dynamics and effectiveness.

poster

### 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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The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Humans’ capacity for Theory of Mind (ToM) allows us to reason about and infer others’ mental states, including their emotions. While ToM has been extensively studied in interpersonal contexts, how people attribute mental states–particularly emotions–to collective entities (e.g., corporations) remains underexplored. The current work examines whether and how people ascribe emotions to collectives using the appraisal theory framework. Participants were randomly assigned to scenarios designed to elicit a specific emotional inference about either an individual (e.g., a lawyer) or a collective (e.g., a law firm). We then collected and compared emotion attributions and appraisal judgments of the situations across both conditions. Our results suggest that people attribute emotions to individuals and collectives in remarkably similar ways, with subtle differences in event appraisals. The results pave the way for a deeper understanding of collective ToM, with implications for studying moral judgments and decision-making in societal contexts.

Collective Emotions: Appraisal-based similarity in emotion attributions to individuals and groups

How do language models assign responsibility and reward, and is it similar to how humans do it? We instructed three state-of-the-art large language models to assign responsibility (Experiment 1) and reward (Experiment 2) to agents in a collaborative task. We then compared the language models’ responses to seven existing cognitive models of responsibility and reward allocation. We found that language models mostly evaluated agents based on force (how much they actually did), in line with classical production-style accounts of causation. By contrast, humans valued actual and counterfactual effort (how much agents tried or could have tried). These results indicate a potential barrier to effective human-machine collaboration.

Language models assign responsibility based on actual rather than counterfactual contributions

Pragmatic atypicality is widely considered to be a central characteristic of autism. This is often explained as a consequence of Theory of Mind deficits. However, this account is flawed and biased. In this paper, we revisit the Double Empathy Problem and provide an experience-first approach to autistic pragmatics. We start with proposing a mechanistic explanation of a link between experiential differences and intentionality understanding in linguistic contexts using the Interpretive Sensory Access theory. Then, we explain how theories of common ground in communication involve factors beyond intention recognition and even beyond cooperation, highlighting how the egocentric nature of communication is relevant to one’s attention and experiences. Taken together, we put forward an experience-based approach to understand autistic pragmatic atypicalities. This view is compatible with many other non-linguistic characteristics well-documented in autism, and prioritizes the experience of autistic people, instead of framing it as a communication disorder with a “mind-reading failure”.

An Experience-First Approach to Autistic Pragmatics 

People can adjust how fast they update task rules, depending on the volatility of their environment. We investigated whether this adaptivity is primarily driven by recently experienced volatility in task demands, or can also be shaped by learned, environment-specific associations with expected levels of volatility. To this end, we trained participants on a Wisconsin Card Sorting Task where different environments required different speeds of task rule updating. We demonstrate that, initially, participants updated strategies depending on the most recent experienced levels of volatility and feedback (Experiment 1). However, after extensive (four days) training (Experiment 2), participants also developed environment-specific associations. Our findings provide important insights in how people learn to regulate cognitive flexibility.

Learning task rule updating strategies requires extensive practice 

Word meanings are rarely transparent from their extralinguistic contexts. How children learn words from an input with “low-informative” (LI) events is of interest because even adults struggle to learn from LI events (Gleitman & Trueswell, 2020; Medina et al., 2011). This study revisited LI events’ contribution to learning by probing what can be gleaned from LI events even if they don’t yield exact meanings. Adults (N = 120) learned words (e.g., “modi”) that had English meanings (e.g., “apple”) from LI events. Participants then both guessed the word’s exact meaning and rated several candidate meanings. Although LI events failed to yield accurate mappings of meanings, they led to representations (derived via the ratings) that were semantically aligned with those of the true meanings. These results highlight the potential for LI events to get learning off the ground and the implications of viewing word learning as more than a mapping problem.

Beyond Word Meaning Mappings: The Role of Low-Informative Events in Conceptual Alignment

The current study investigates how pronominal ambiguity is resolved in real-time, focusing on the role of referent bias and task context. In two self-paced reading experiments, we tested whether ambiguity leads to processing benefits or costs modulated by the presence of a biased referent and the task manipulations. Experiment 1 showed that the ambiguity advantage emerges only when a biased referent is not selected, supporting reanalysis-based accounts such as the unrestricted race model (Van Gompel et al., 2000, 2001, 2005). Experiment 2, however, revealed a delayed ambiguity penalty, suggesting task-induced shifts in processing strategy that better fit a delayed interpretation account. These findings highlight that pronominal ambiguity resolution may involve two processing mechanisms shaped by the parser's evaluation space and the timing of selection.

Who and when gets the race? Two processing routes for the advantages and penalties of pronominal ambiguity resolution

People regularly make inferences about objects in the world that they cannot see by flexibly integrating information from multiple sources: auditory and visual cues, language, and our prior beliefs and knowledge about the scene. How are we able to so flexibly integrate many sources of information to make sense of the world around us, even if we have no direct knowledge? In this work, we propose a neurosymbolic model that uses neural networks to parse open-ended multimodal inputs and then applies a Bayesian model to integrate different sources of information to evaluate different hypotheses. We evaluate our model with a novel object guessing game called "What's in the Box?'' where humans and models watch a video clip of an experimenter shaking boxes and then try to guess the objects inside the boxes. Through a human experiment, we show that our model correlates strongly with human judgments, whereas unimodal ablated models and large multimodal neural model baselines showed poor correlation.

What’s in the Box? Reasoning about Unseen Objects from Multimodal Cues

Xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments have been increasing in Western democratic countries, and it is important to understand how messaging can improve attitudes towards immigrants. Past studies show prior attitudes are associated with how individuals evaluate related arguments. The present study (N = 349) explores if people’s prior attitudes influence how they evaluate the strength of arguments in the context of immigration. We also test whether the style of argument (i.e., narrative or statistical) influences argument evaluation. We measured participants’ attitudes towards immigrants before and after an argument evaluation task, where participants rated the quality of a narrative and statistical argument.  Participants with high pre-existing negative attitudes towards immigrants rated pro-immigrant arguments poorly and anti-immigrant arguments strongly, and we see the opposite relationship for participants with pre-existing positive attitudes towards immigrants.  Our findings demonstrate that people can evaluate the same arguments about immigrants very differently depending on their pre-existing attitudes and that argument style can affect argument evaluation.

Reducing Negative Attitudes Towards Immigrants – The Role of Prior Attitudes and Argument Style 

Generics, general statements about categories, are believed to transmit essentialist beliefs---the idea that things have a hidden true nature. Research suggests that people essentialize natural (biological and non-living) and social kinds, but not artifacts. Previous studies using small datasets found that generics are often used to describe animate beings in speech to children. Using a larger corpus of children's books and parent speech, we examined a wider range of kinds and generalizing statements (habituals and universals). Our results show that generics are more likely used for biological kinds than artifacts and that their use increases in parent speech as children age. However, generics weren't more likely used for non-living or social kinds than artifacts. Habituals, at least in speech, were more likely used for social kinds than artifacts. Generalizing statements were more likely used for about non-living natural kinds than artifacts. These findings inform the debate over whether generics transmit essentialist beliefs.

Generics revisited: Analyzing generalizations in children's books and caregivers' speech

Music-emotion recognition, the ability to perceive emotions in music, has emerged as a means of understanding emotion beyond verbal language, specifically for individuals with special educational needs (SEN). However, there has been little focus on delineating emotion through quantified music features for a systematic comparison between different SEN groups. This study identified specific musical features and examined the different music-emotion processing patterns in 3-to 10-year-old Chinese children with and without SEN. Participants completed a forced-choice task by identifying four emotions involving happiness, sadness, anger, and fear from Western classical music. Through integrating a biologically-inspired filterbank into music information retrieval analysis, the result revealed that musical features, such as spectral density, contributed to human emotional recognition. In addition, children with SEN exhibited distinct confusion patterns in some emotion pairs compared to their typically developing counterparts. These findings demonstrated a novel approach to investigating musical-emotional recognition across the developmental span.

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Collective Emotions: Appraisal-based similarity in emotion attributions to individuals and groups

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Collective Emotions: Appraisal-based similarity in emotion attributions to individuals and groups

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