United States

This study investigates how interface differences affect willingness for social sharing of emotion with conversational AI depending on motives (cognitive support vs. social-affective support vs. capitalization), while comparing social sharing of emotion with humans. Perceived impressions (warmth and competence) are examined as correlates of willingness ratings. Data from 195 Japanese undergraduates were analyzed. The results showed that for social-affective and cognitive support motives, participants preferred text-based modality over voice-based modality, particularly text-based modality without an avatar. For the capitalization motive, participants preferred interfaces with avatars. Moreover, perceived warmth was positively related to willingness for social sharing with AI for social-affective support and capitalization motives, whereas perceived competence was positively related for cognitive and social-affective support motives. A different pattern of results was found for social sharing of emotions with humans. This study provides novel insights that contribute to the design of conversational AI interfaces.

CogSci 2025

Willingness for social sharing of emotion with conversational AI and humans in mediated communication: A comparison across different interfaces and motives

human-computer interaction

psychology

artificial intelligence

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

Negations (e.g. “the ball isn’t red”) are thought to contain less information than their positive counterparts (e.g. "the ball is green"), which poses a pragmatic puzzle: why ever use them? We contend that negations convey additional information about a speaker's mental model of the world, revealing preferences and expectations. For example, "the ball isn't red" implies the speaker's expectation that the ball could or should have been red — that it being red was worth considering. Here, we demonstrate that speakers take advantage of the dual world and world-model information conveyed by negation when faced with the need to efficiently share information about their beliefs across many contexts. Across four experiments, we demonstrate that speakers use significantly more negations when differentiating between possible causal models of a situation, explaining their political beliefs to a member of the opposite party, discussing racial differences, and sharing genre-specific sources of narrative conflict.

Negation as a tool for conveying mental models

Understanding how children's spontaneous language behavior relates to standardized metrics of language development remains a crucial challenge in developmental science, particularly given the time and resources required for many traditional lab-based assessments. This study investigates whether automated analysis of naturalistic, child-centered audio recordings can index the developmental trajectory of speech-language abilities. Using a longitudinal design following N=130 preschoolers, we employed deep learning methods to compute Canonical Proportion - a theoretically-motivated metric that reflects both speech motor control development and phonological representation building  - from naturalistic, child-centered audio recordings at age 3 years. Canonical proportion measures significantly predicted multiple dimensions of speech-language development longitudinally, formally assessed in the lab one year later at age 4. The strongest relationships were found for consonant articulation skill and vocabulary size, suggesting that early speech production patterns may moderately index numerous later facets of language development. These findings outline a potential relationship between children's spontaneous, everyday language behavior and more traditional language development metrics, while demonstrating the potential for automated measures to expand and diversify research in developmental science.

Can automated vocal analyses over child-centered audio recordings be used to predict speech-language development?

Analogical transfer is well studied, but much less is known about how students transfer within specific domains. Computer science presents an opportunity to study such transfer, as students often transition from block-based (e.g., Scratch) to text-based (e.g., Python) programming languages. As an early step in understanding programming transfer, we present a conceptual analysis that predicts when students may be aided by analogical supports when transferring from Scratch to Python. We are specifically guided by Structure Mapping theory, which states analogy is a process of aligning objects and relations based on their common structure (Gentner, 1983, 2010). Much research has found that surface similarity influences transfer; thus, we categorized various programming concepts (iteration, booleans, etc.) based on their perceptual similarity. Further, we make predictions about where and how progressive alignment (Kotovsky & Gentner, 1996) can be used to facilitate relational understanding. This analysis sets the stage for future experimental work.

Conceptual Analysis of Analogical Transfer in Common Programming Languages

Pronouns are unique in discourse, as their meaning depends almost entirely on context. Early theories provided simple accounts of how meaning is determined, but research has revealed complex influences across syntax, semantics, discourse, and pragmatics. Evaluating theories is challenging due to methodological inconsistencies and a focus on English, limiting generalizability. Here, we take a step towards a clear empirical foundation for theory, with a tightly controlled study of comprehension of overt and null pronouns in Turkish. We show that pronoun resolution in Turkish is influenced by verb type, word order, and referential form, though not always in ways predicted by existing theories. Our findings highlight the need for further cross-linguistic research to refine models of pronoun interpretation and better account for the interaction of syntactic and discourse factors.

Referential Form, Word Order, and Implicit Causality in Turkish Emotion Verbs

This study examines knowledge as an emergent, adaptive system shaped by the interaction between internal cognitive processes and external factors. Contrary to traditional views of knowledge as a static repository, this framework emphasizes its evolution through self-organizing processes and conceptual reorganization. The research addresses the limitations of computational models in capturing the complexity of cognition, questioning whether they can adequately represent the depth and emergent qualities of cognitive processes. Additionally, it explores how computational approaches might reconcile with the embodied, experiential nature of knowledge. The study adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining systems theory and cognitive modeling. It focuses on functional variances and state transitions within, how they adapt and organize themselves. The goal is to uncover the ontological complexity of cognition and provide a nuanced understanding of how knowledge emerges, adapts, and reorganizes within cognitive systems and environmental contexts.

Reconceptualizing Knowledge: Evaluating the Ontological Complexity and Emergence of Knowledge in Cognitive Systems

Individuals typically respond faster and with greater velocity when pursuing rewarding options. However, people sometimes forgo personal gain to punish unfair behavior. How vigorously do they engage in such costly punishment? We introduce a novel framework linking neuroeconomic decision-making to movement vigor. In Study 1, using a motor version of the Ultimatum Game, we found that movement vigor increased with offer value for accepted offers but decreased with offer value for rejected ones (costly punishments). In Study 2, we examined the factors driving this reversal. Using a social economic exchange task, we found that punishment vigor was not driven by either the self-incurred cost or the absolute cost inflicted on the other, but rather by the efficiency of the punishment, that is, the ratio of other-cost to self-cost. These findings suggest that when people incur personal costs to punish, movement vigor accurately tracks the weighting of other-inflicted costs against self-costs.

The Vigor of Punishment: Control of Movement Vigor in Social Decision–Making

Children are attuned to prosocial behavior from early in development and engage in helpful and cooperative behaviors. However, helping is not always helpful. Decades of research has shown that unsolicited offers of help can threaten the self-esteem of recipients, especially to the degree that recipients perceive themselves as competent. We know that young children view helping positively and appreciate the benefits of helpful actions. To what extent are they also aware of possible harms? Are young children aware that unsolicited offers of help may upset others, especially to the degree that the intended beneficiary is able to perform the task alone? Here, we show that both older (N= 30,  mean: 7.02; range 6- 7.97) and younger (N= 30,  mean: 4.95; range 4.02-6) children understand that unsolicited offers of help are more likely to upset high than low competent recipients.

Intuitions about prosocial backfiring: Four to seven-year olds’ understanding of when helping might cause offense

Sound symbolism is a linguistic feature that may suggest a non-arbitrary link between sound and semantic content that has been shown to play a role in language acquisition, and potentially language evolution. One sound-symbolic structure known as phonesthemes has been identified in many languages. Phonesthemes are sub-morphemic sound patterns associated with specific meanings more frequently than chance. Cognitive approaches to phonesthemes typically rely on a known example. Phonesthemes are not well attested in Japanese, so this approach is not an easy option. This research provides a route for research into the cognitive effects -- in particular language acquisition -- of Japanese sound symbolism. I present a model for identifying phonestheme-like features in Japanese adapted from a model originally used with English and identify two candidates in Japanese. I also outline methods for empirically testing the psychological reality of these clusters based on existing English and Japanese sound symbolism literature.

Automatic Detection of Phonestheme-like features in Japanese – Insights for Cognitive Sound Symbolism Research

Parental mental health subclinical features, such as stress, anxiety, and depression, have been reported to significantly influence the dynamics of parent-infant interaction, which sets the stage for early attention, learning, and social communication development. However, less is known about the influence of cognitive and social features, such as those related to broad autism phenotype (BAP) traits, despite their documented impact on attention control and sensory processing. The present study examines how parental BAP traits may relate to parent-infant interaction by focusing on their behaviors, using head-mounted eye-tracking to provide objective measures. Results indicated that BAP traits were related to rates of parent sustained attention and object handling but did not predict infants’ sustained attention during the interaction. The findings of variability in parental play behaviors based on BAP traits raise important questions regarding the direct impact of parental characteristics on early social interaction, infants’ potential adaptations to their learning environments, and the significance of BAP traits in infant development.

Parental Broad Autism Phenotype Traits and Their Influence on Early Social Interaction and Attention

This paper presents a categorization experiment supporting the hypothesis that base-rate-neglect occurs in linguistic category learning (and, thus, is a cross-domain phenomenon), and that it is more likely for those learners who engage in explicit problem-solving, rather than implicit learning. We find that among those participants who were able to verbalize the cue that was probabilistically associated with category-membership (correct-staters) in a phonological learning task, about a third respond in a way consistent with base-rate-neglect. On the other hand, non-staters are more likely to respond randomly or by probability matching the base-rates. These results suggest that explicit learning is associated with base-rate-neglect to a greater extent. We found that no learners integrate the two probabilistic patterns present in the experiment into a single Bayesian estimate. Rather, some of them focus on the base-rates, others focus on category-internal cues, and others simply fail to learn anything.

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Negation as a tool for conveying mental models

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Negation as a tool for conveying mental models

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