United States

Early childhood beliefs play a crucial role in shaping engineering engagement. This study examines how engineering competence and interest vary across gender, race/ethnicity, and age among children aged 5–12 (n= 16; data collection ongoing), exploring the relationship between identity-related beliefs and task performance in a hands-on science museum. Participants were assessed on engineering-related perceived competence and interests, and parent’s beliefs. Measures were correlated with persistence and effectiveness in an engineering activity (build a tinfoil boat) linked to problem-solving/creativity. Preliminary results suggest that boys and girls did not differ significantly in engineering perceived competence or interest. Girls were able to support twice as many marbles (25) in their created boat than were boys (12). Age weakly positively correlated with task performance. Our findings show no major gender differences in interest or perceived competence at these young ages, and could inform strategies to enhance STEM engagement among diverse learners.

CogSci 2025

Early Engineering Identity: Examining Competence, Interest, and Affect

field studies

verbal protocol studies

developmental analysis

cognitive development

skill acquisition and learning

psychology

survey

emotion

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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#### 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.

Conspiracy theories explain the cause of world events through the machinations of shadowy, secret groups. Understanding what in conspiracy theories makes them appealing explanations is an important area of research. People like explanations that can account for a large number of seen events (broad explanatory scope), while not accounting for every possible unseen event (narrow latent scope). It is unknown if people think conspiracy theories have broad or narrow scope and how this may relate to their believability. We thus explored perceptions of conspiracy theory explanations’ scope and how this relates to their believability. Participants rated 40 conspiracy theories and their fact-based alternative explanations. Fact-based explanations were seen as having larger explanatory and latent scope. Additionally, larger scope was positively correlated with higher believability for both explanation types. We discuss how these findings relate to the explanation literature and highlight important elements of the seductive appeal of conspiracy theories.

Go Big or Go Hoax: Explanatory Scope and the Believability of Conspiracy Theories

Evidence from studies of knowledge revision show the refutation text is an effective tool for helping readers correct their inaccurate understandings. While refutation shows immediate benefits in group comparisons, it is unclear whether these benefits are restricted to particular retention intervals, if these benefits generalize across topics, or what predicts knowledge revision following refutation. In the present study, participants evaluated misconceptions across various science topics, then read a mix of refutation and expository texts and were prompted to rate their surprise and confusion after each text. Participants then re-evaluated the misconceptions immediately after reading the texts and again at a two-week delay. While both texts reduced misconception endorsement, refutation texts lead to a greater reduction in misconception endorsement on both the immediate posttest and at a two-week delay. Finally, exploratory analyses suggest participants' ratings of surprise predicted knowledge revision and partially mediated the effect of text type on knowledge revision.

Overcoming Science Misconceptions: When is Refutation an Effective Tool for Knowledge Revision?

Manipulated visual information recalibrates proprioception in which participants perceive their body parts to be at a different location from their actual position in the body. Previous studies have provided direct visual information regarding the manipulated position of the body parts, which have often been the limbs in this context. In our experiments, we manipulated the location of the viewpoint and/or the virtual right arm during the training session. The viewpoint corresponds to the position of the head, indicating the position of the trunk connected to the head. The results of the experiments showed that this indirect visual information could cause a proprioceptive recalibration of the trunk, a very fundamental body part. In addition, a comparison with the arm, for which direct visual information was provided, suggests that the recalibration of the trunk in the absence of direct visual information was weaker than that of the arm.

Proprioceptive Recalibration by Moving Viewpoint: The Effect of Indirect Positional Information of Torso

In adults, the contribution of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus to memory encoding varies depending on the type of information being learned. Because these regions are still developing in children, their contribution to the formation of memories for different types of associations may differ from that of adults. Here, we examined how semantic and perceptual similarity between items affects memory behaviour and neural engagement in children (6-7 years) and adults. Participants completed a pair learning task during functional magnetic resonance imaging, in which pairs were perceptually or semantically related. Memory was tested outside the scanner with cued recall. Semantic similarity facilitated recall in both age groups, but more so in adults. Neurally, semantic pairs elicited broad frontoparietal activity while perceptual pairs engaged ventral visual and lateral prefrontal areas. Children showed more distinct neural responses to semantic versus perceptual pairs than adults, as well as more engagement in anterior hippocampus for semantic than perceptual pairs. These findings suggest that semantic similarity provides a powerful scaffold for memory across development, with age-related changes in memory encoding marked by a shift toward reliance on more integrated neural systems.

Neural Signatures of Semantic and Perceptual Memory Formation Become More Similar Across Development

Transferring knowledge to new situations is essential for learning (Gentner, 2003) but notoriously difficult (Gick & Holyoak, 1983). In computer science education, students are expected to transfer knowledge of earlier taught block-based programming languages (e.g., Scratch) when they transition to more challenging text-based languages (e.g., Python). However, still little is known about whether and how students engage in such transfer. To explore these ideas, we developed an assessment for late-elementary and middle-school students proficient in Scratch that provides brief instruction on similarities with a novel text-language (Python) for various concepts (conditionals, iteration, etc.). Students were then assessed as to whether they could transfer their knowledge to conceptually related problems in Python. Results indicate students struggle in transferring most concepts, particularly those with syntactic differences. These findings are consistent with ACT-R theory (Anderson & Schunn, 2000) and suggest students may benefit from targeted transfer support when learning new programming languages.

Capturing Student’s Spontaneous Knowledge Transfer Between Block and Text-Based Programming Languages

Public health data highlight disease outcome disparities corresponding to age, social class, and race, which are due to biological, behavioral, and/or structural factors (depending on the disparity). We examined whether adults are aware of these disparities and how they explain them. This study recruited U.S. adults (N = 241) through Mechanical Turk and examined whether they thought that there was a relation between social categories and illness. We examined their judgments and explanations for transmitting and contracting COVID-19 or the common cold. We found that adults thought that older adults and poor people were more likely than younger adults and rich people to get sick, whereas younger adults were more likely than older adults to transmit disease. People relied on biological explanations for disparities due to age, and structural explanations for disparities due to social class. However, the results for race were more mixed, suggesting that people do not always assume that social categories are related to illness.

U.S. adults’ beliefs and explanations about health disparities

Previous work has suggested that category labels can facilitate faster rates of category learning. To better understand the role that labels play in this phenomenon, the present study investigates whether this labeling advantage coincides with a warping of representational space that is indicative of categorical perception. To this end, we collected behavioral and EEG data during two tasks: an approach-avoid task in which category boundaries are learned and a same-different task. The behavioral results replicate the labeling advantage in category learning and suggest that CP effects are strengthened by the influence of labels. Representational similarity analyses of EEG brain activity collected during the approach-avoid task provide additional support for this theory, showing that stimulus representations exhibit patterns of representational warping that are characteristic of CP when the labeling advantage is most prominent. Together, these findings contribute to a richer understanding of how labels facilitate category learning.

Labels Facilitate Categorical Perception Effects during Novel Category Learning

Baby-schema is a social perception phenomenon describing how infantile facial features and their abstract representation in animals and objects automatically engage human caregiving responses. While often considered universal, its cross-cultural variability remains untested outside large-scale industrialized communities. Does cultural background and visual experience influence perceptual and behavioral biases of baby-schema?

We examined responses to manipulated infant faces in two Indigenous Malaysian (Batek, Temiar) and an urban German community. In a pre-registered eye-tracking task, participants viewed human and cat face pairs differing only in baby-schema-level (high vs. low) and completed a pre-registered binary forced-choice task. Germans selected high baby-schema faces as more likable, cuter, younger, and healthier, while small-scale communities showed attenuated or absent effects and were less sensitive to baby-schema manipulations in a control discrimination-task. Eye-tracking showed cultural differences in gaze patterns that were not meaningfully influenced by species or baby-schema-level. A follow-up study will investigate effects of group membership.

Cultural Variability in Baby-Schema Perception: Insights on Face Perception from Two Small-Scale Malaysian and An Urban German Community

When facing tasks that are difficult to solve optimally, people can construct simplifying strategies that trade off utility with cost (Ho et al., 2022, Callaway et al., 2022). How we do so is an open question, especially in domains with large, structured strategy spaces where strategy evaluation itself is costly. One proposal is that people select strategies without much online computation, by a process of (reinforcement) learning through experience (Lieder & Griffiths, 2017). We present an alternative, resource-rational metareasoning framework that integrates strategy learning with adaptively bounded amounts of online strategy evaluation. We compare these proposals using a new video game task in which players traverse a grid of moving colored tiles while respecting complex rules about valid color sequences. Players quickly discover simplifying strategies, such as “only step on red tiles,” and adapt when the environment changes to favor new strategies, in ways that are most consistent with adaptive metareasoning.

Strategy selection in complex tasks through adaptive integration of learned and online metareasoning

Human behavior is determined by both learned habits and prospective planning. Because planning is computationally expensive, humans face two meta-control challenges: They must determine when to plan and, if so, which potential futures to consider. We propose that habit learning itself could solve these meta-control problems by prioritizing which futures to explore and to what extent. We show how this notion emerges from a normative Bayesian model and test one of the resulting predictions empirically. To do so, we developed a behavioral paradigm that operationalizes model-based planning as spatial navigation through a maze. Our findings suggest that humans indeed incorporate learned habitual information during planning in a manner closely aligned with the Bayesian model. This corroborates existing reinforcement learning accounts and contributes a normative and unifying perspective.

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Go Big or Go Hoax: Explanatory Scope and the Believability of Conspiracy Theories

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Go Big or Go Hoax: Explanatory Scope and the Believability of Conspiracy Theories

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