United States

The present study aimed to examine the relationship between rumination and two core executive functions, inhibition and switching, through an experimental design. Undergraduate participants (N=153) were randomly assigned to a rumination induction, a negative mood induction, or an abstract distraction control. Participants completed a task-switching paradigm before and after induction, providing inhibition and switch-cost indices. The Ruminative Response Scale (RRS) and the Leiden Index of Depression Sensitivity (LEIDS-R) were administered to measure trait rumination and cognitive reactivity, respectively. Significant three-way interactions were observed, with participants low in trait rumination and high in cognitive reactivity in the negative mood induction group demonstrating the least switching costs. Interestingly, no significant differences emerged among those with either high or low levels of both traits across all conditions. The study showed a complex picture between rumination and cognitive reactivity, suggesting that the impact of rumination on executive function performance depends on reactivity levels.

CogSci 2025

Investigating the Relationship Between Rumination and Executive Functions: The case of Inhibition and Switching

psychology

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP)<br>
EMNLP 2023 General Chair<br><br><br><br>

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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.

The prepositions “in” and “on” are used in a wide variety of concrete, spatial contexts as well as abstract, non-spatial contexts. Previous research suggests that the meanings of these prepositions when used in abstract, non-spatial contexts might be grounded in the meanings these same prepositions have when they are used in concrete, spatial contexts; however, few studies have attempted to empirically test for evidence of these connections directly. The current study attempted to conceptually replicate Feist and Breaux (2013): No evidence of priming was observed. It could be that our prime stimuli did not adequately activate the meanings of “in” and “on” or that our participants’ linguistic habits obscured any impact of the prime stimuli. Further research is needed to truly understand the role that grounded connections might play in the lexical semantics of words that are used in both abstract and spatial contexts.

Resolving the Ambiguity of “In” and “On” Across Spatial and Abstract Contexts

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate high performance across various tasks, yet they struggle with those requiring complex comprehension and reasoning. LLMs are not solely reliant on memorization: responses can be generated to novel prompts by interpolating between learned data points in a continuous vector space. However, they exhibit limitations in their inherent reasoning capabilities.
Despite efforts to enhance their reasoning abilities, such as Chain-of-Thought prompting and test-time inference techniques, LLMs still face challenges in this domain. In contrast, humans utilize mental models—internal representations of situations and concepts—to adapt and solve novel situations.
Integrating external modules that emulate the construction and utilization of mental models could offer a promising avenue for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs. This approach could bridge the gap between current LLM capabilities and human-like reasoning, potentially leading to more robust and reliable LLMs.

Beyond Interpolation: Enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) with Mental Models

Mutual exclusivity (ME), the tendency to map novel words to unfamiliar referents, can support children’s word learning (e.g., Markman & Wachtel, 1988). A recent study (in prep) demonstrated that 4-year-old English-speaking children show a weaker ME effect for novel verbs than nouns, consistent with evidence that verbs are harder to learn (e.g., Gentner, 1982). Here, we replicated this study in adults. Adults viewed videos (verb trials) or static images (noun trials), one familiar and one unfamiliar, and selected the best match for a novel verb or noun. Adults applied ME for both verbs and nouns, but significantly less for verbs (z = 4.073, p = 0.0003). Adults also had longer reaction times (β = 471.25, p < 0.0001) and lower confidence ratings (β = -7.035, p < 0.0001) for verbs than nouns. Thus, less use of ME for verbs stems from something about event conceptualization rather than child development.

Mutual Exclusivity in Noun and Verb Learning in Adults

Emerging Morphosyntactic Prediction in Early Childhood: A Visual Tracking Study
Linguistic prediction, a key mechanism in language acquisition (Dell & Chang, 2014), enables anticipation of upcoming linguistic input based on contextual cues (Mani & Huettig, 2012; Angulo-Chavira et al., in review). This eye-tracking study investigated gender-based morphosyntactic prediction in Spanish-speaking toddlers aged 30 and 36 months. Participants heard highly constraining sentences (e.g., La gallina puso su... [The hen laid its…]) while viewing images of a gender-matching competitor (cuchillo [knife]), which shared only grammatical gender with the target (huevo [egg]), and a distractor (gorra [cap]). Results revealed that 36-month-olds, but not 30-month-olds, shifted their gaze toward the gender-matching competitor before hearing the target noun, indicating developmental differences in morphosyntactic processing. These findings suggest that the ability to integrate morphosyntactic cues into predictive language processing emerges by 36 months, providing empirical evidence on the developmental trajectory of linguistic prediction in early childhood.

Emerging Morphosyntactic Prediction in Early Childhood: A Visual Tracking Study

Human reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty often deviate from normative standards of rationality. Over the past decades, cognitive scientists have extensively investigated heuristics and cognitive biases, such as overconfidence—the tendency to overestimate the probability that one’s judgments are correct. Meanwhile, philosophers have explored different “cognitive utilities” that guide both scientific and everyday reasoning, including the concept of truthlikeness, i.e., how well an hypothesis, be it a statement or a numerical interval, approximates the whole truth about a target domain. In this paper, we integrate empirical findings with philosophical perspectives, showing how formal models of truthlikeness offer valuable insights for empirical research on overconfidence. In particular, by conceptualizing overconfidence through the lens of expected truthlikeness maximization, we argue that many instances of this phenomenon may be construed not as cognitive biases, but rather as rational strategies for approaching the truth under conditions of uncertainty.

Overconfidence as Truth Approximation

Recent advances in computational modeling have expanded our capacity to analyze language and communication, particularly through transformer models. The present work investigates how such computational frameworks can be leveraged to address clinical domains in communication disorders. We used semantic embeddings from BERT's layers to analyze language-related adjustments used by participants with traumatic brain injury (TBI) in conversational transcripts. By examining semantic convergence patterns across different layers of the BERT model, we found that TBI participants demonstrated more pronounced "self" convergence -- they tended to stay closer to their own semantic contributions in the conversation -- compared to controls. This effect was particularly noticeable at earlier layers of the BERT model, suggesting that surface-level semantics play a significant role. The findings highlight the potential for language models to enhance our understanding of social interaction dynamics. We further discuss how bridging computational linguistics with clinical domains can address analytic challenges in the study of natural cognition and communication.

Mapping Communication Disruption in Traumatic Brain Injury with Transformer Embeddings

This work explores the social dynamics triggered by abstract and concrete concepts (e.g., fantasy vs. bottle) integrating traditional research methods with an interactive paradigm. It introduces Vagueness, a semantic dimension that distinguishes between determinate and vague concepts (e.g., subtraction vs. freedom). A preliminary norming study reveals that while Vagueness is partially predicted by Abstractness, it represents a distinct and meaningful semantic component. The main study further demonstrates that Abstractness and Vagueness uniquely shape how dyads evaluate the quality of their collaborative interactions.

Interactive Dynamics with Concepts Varying in Abstractness and Vagueness

Depictions are spatio-temporal arrangements of symbols carrying information about the entities the symbols stand for. We hypothesized that symbolic displays should specifically facilitate the encoding of spatial relations. We tested this hypothesis in 10-month-old infants by exposing them to configurations of unfamiliar objects in a communicative context (which should promote the interpretation of the objects as potential symbols) and in a non-communicative context. We assessed infants' memory for the object arrays by measuring looking times to arrays that matched the original display or altered the identity or the configuration of the objects. A Bayesian hierarchical model on log-transformed looking times revealed a main effect of identity change but no significant interaction between configuration change and communicative context. However, within-condition comparisons showed significantly longer looking to identity changes in both contexts, and to configuration changes only in the communicative condition, suggesting that symbolic displays specifically enhanced the encoding of spatial relations.

The detection of configuration and identity changes of object arrays in infancy

Cotard's delusion, featuring delusions of nonexistence, is rare and not well understood. We used lesion network mapping (LNM) to investigate how focal lesions disrupt large-scale circuits in CD and compared them with other neuropsychiatric conditions. Nineteen lesion-induced CD cases were identified from a systematic review; each lesion was mapped to a standard template, and resting-state fMRI from 1,000 healthy subjects provided functional connectivity. A group-level CD map was defined by stringent sensitivity and specificity thresholds, which then served as a seed for connectivity analysis. We assessed spatial correlations with 31 published lesion-network datasets. A CD-specific network emerged in the right inferior frontal cortex, anterior insula, anterior temporal pole, and temporoparietal junction. Strongest overlaps were observed with Capgras delusion, akinetic mutism, mania, and loss of consciousness, reflecting shared disruptions in self-awareness and salience processing. Unique peaks in the temporoparietal junction and frontal operculum highlight CD’s distinct nihilistic features.

Lesion Network Mapping of Cotard's Delusion:  Unique and Shared Neural Circuits in Nihilistic Delusions, Misidentification Delusions, and Altered Consciousness

This study explores inter-subject neural synchronization, measured via inter-subject correlation (ISC), using EEG during fractal animation observation. Fractal animations, characterized by iterative self-similarity and visual complexity, provide a controlled stimulus devoid of semantic or emotional content, facilitating analysis of core sensory and predictive mechanisms. Fifteen participants watched fractal animations while their EEG was recorded. Following preprocessing, including artifact removal and spatial filtering, ISC was calculated using correlated component analysis. Results showed robust synchronization in occipital regions, linked to early visual processing, and frontal areas, associated with attentional control. Two control manipulations—phase randomization and temporal shuffling—reduced ISC by 65% and 70% (p < 0.001), confirming coherence. Peak synchronization aligned with heightened visual complexity and abrupt transitions. A correlation between self-reported focus and ISC highlighted top-down modulation. These findings endorse fractal animations as a powerful paradigm for studying neural responses, yielding insights into multisensory integration and cognitive processing.

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Resolving the Ambiguity of “In” and “On” Across Spatial and Abstract Contexts

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