United States

CogSci 2025

Young Children Spontaneously Appreciate the Perspectives of their Social Partners

cognitive development

social cognition

theory of mind

psychology

### 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.

poster

Previous studies observed a robust effect of grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) when learners are exposed to orthographic input while learning novel words. Specifically, if the novel words share the same GPC mapping with learners’ native language, then this Congruency effect helps learning. Likewise, if the GPC is in a one-to-one mapping relation, this effect of Systematicity improves learning too. However, no studies have looked at the interaction of Congruency and Systematicity on word learning or explored both consonant and vowel stimuli. Here, we show no significant orthographic effect when the consonantal GPC mappings were manipulated, particularly because performance was close to the ceiling. And so, while congruent and systematic GPC mappings could facilitate learning, they were not as robust as the literature had suggested. Nevertheless, the effect of Systematicity was significant in the Vowel Sets, likely due to more exposure to the stimuli.

The Effects of Congruent and Systematic Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences on Novel Word Learning

The relationship between language and general cognition is a key question in cognitive science. Statistical learning (SL)—the ability to extract environmental regularities without supervision—is considered a key contributor to language ability. Our study comprehensively assessed adults’ language abilities (grammatical sensitivity, pragmatic comprehension, semantic prediction, violation processing), auditory and visual SL, and other cognitive functions (short-term memory, working memory, perceptual speed) to control for their effects on both language and SL. We hypothesized that auditory and visual SL would predict language abilities, with a stronger relationship for auditory SL. Surprisingly, visual SL was the best predictor of grammatical sensitivity and pragmatic comprehension, while semantic prediction and violation processing were not explained by general cognitive abilities. These results align with findings supporting a SL-language relationship and demonstrate that language is intertwined with general cognition, but also point out that facets of language ability differ in their reliance on general cognitive processes.

The relationship between statistical learning and different facets of language ability: evidence from auditory and visual modalities

In real-world decision making, outcomes are often delayed, meaning individuals must make multiple decisions before receiving any feedback. Moreover, feedback can be presented in different ways: it may summarize the overall results of multiple decisions (aggregated feedback) or report the outcome of individual decisions after some delay (clustered feedback). Despite its importance, the timing and presentation of delayed feedback has received little attention in cognitive modeling of decision-making, which typically focuses on immediate feedback. To address this, we conducted an experiment to compare the effect of delayed vs. immediate feedback and aggregated vs. clustered feedback. We also propose a Hierarchical Instance-Based Learning (HIBL) model that captures how people make decisions in delayed feedback settings. HIBL uses a super-model that chooses between sub-models to perform the decision-making task until an outcome is observed. Simulations show that HIBL best predicts human behavior and specific patterns, demonstrating the flexibility of IBL models.

Hierarchical Instance-Based Learning for Decision Making from Delayed Feedback

In language comprehension, mental representations of temporal relations between described situations are often construed by inference. While the basis for these inferences remains unclear, growing evidence suggests that abstract predicate properties – such as dynamicity and causal structure – play a crucial role in temporal event construal. Across two self-paced reading experiments, replicating and extending Gennari (2004), we find that temporal proximity inferences are shaped by these properties, but only for stative predicates that generally encode non-dynamic situations without causal structure: Participants consistently expected states to overlap in time, in both complement (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that temporal proximity inferences arise as a general feature of (non)-dynamicity, supporting models of language comprehension that prioritize abstract event structural properties in shaping temporal inferences.

Temporal proximity inferences in complex sentence comprehension: Evidence from English complement and relative clauses

Hemmatian and Sloman (2018) showed that the degree to which a label is perceived to be entrenched in society impacts the judged quality of the categorical explanation that invokes it, irrespective of how informative the explanation actually is (“label entrenchment heuristic”). Across four experiments, we show that US partisans rate the informativeness of a circular categorical explanation as higher when the label it invokes is perceived to be entrenched in a particular political community than when the label is not entrenched in any community irrespective of whether the label belongs to the political in-group or the political out-group. Furthermore, we demonstrate that one’s relationship to the community that entrenches the label mediates the effect: Democrats find the categorical explanations to be more persuasive when the label they invoke is entrenched in the Democratic political community than when it is entrenched in the Republican political community, and vice versa for Republicans.

Label Entrenchment Heuristic in Political Communities

Many computational models of morphology represent complex words by n-grams to account for lexical processing and acquisition. However, while n-gram models are simple and efficient, they are not without problems. From a cognitive perspective, it is unclear how n-gram words are represented in the mental lexicon and how these representations affect language use and acquisition. From a computational perspective, these models are problematic because n-gram representations are often ambiguous and redundant: they make very limited use of distributional information and neglect the role of efficiency and sequential processing in language use and acquisition. In this paper, we present a new computational approach to morphology that is cognitively more plausible than standard n-gram models. By analyzing data from the nominal number system in German, we show that a task-specific algorithm of linear processing guided by the principles of efficiency and reliability outperforms state-of-the-art n-gram models and also makes predictions about lexical processing that are consistent with the judgments of German native speakers in a psycholinguistic experiment.

Learn What is Detectable, Detect What is Useful

People often engage in episodic counterfactual thinking: simulating alternative ways in which past events might have occurred. Existing research has shown that the perceived plausibility of episodic simulations modulates judgments of regret, mood and prosocial behavior. However, knowledge about the factors influencing the perceived plausibility of episodic counterfactuals is limited or derived from studies using vignette-based hypothetical scenarios. Inspired by research on modal cognition, here we test whether counterfactual plausibility is influenced by a sampling process that prioritizes the generation of plausible alternatives. Additionally, we evaluated whether the sequential generation of episodic counterfactual simulations is associated with vividness and difficulty. Across two experiments we demonstrated that when people generate episodic counter-factual thoughts, they initially produce the most plausible and vivid mental simulations, without concurrent changes in difficulty. Our results provide support for a sampling process that prioritizes the generation of more plausible and vivid counterfactual alternatives over less difficult ones.

Plausibility sampling rather than difficulty influences sequential selection of episodic counterfactual thoughts

It is critical to understand how students’ monitoring activities are related to their actions during learning. In particular, studies have not fully explored how students’ spontaneous use of visual representations relate to their perception of its usefulness and their learning outcomes, especially in interactive learning environments. This study, using a math intelligent tutoring system, examines the relations between students’ perceptions of the usefulness of using diagrammatic scaffolding and their actual patterns of spontaneous diagram use in for secondary-school algebra. Results show that students who evaluated diagrams as useful used diagrams more frequently but showed less learning gains, compared to those who evaluated diagrams as not useful and did not use diagrams frequently. We discuss implications of this finding by connecting with prior work that focuses on drawing as diagram use. This study shows the importance of understanding how spontaneous use of diagrams might or might not help student learning.

When Less is More: Students’ Use of Diagrams and their Perception of Diagram Use in an AI Tutor for Algebra Learning

Abstract concepts are a hallmark of human cognition and culture. However, there is debate over how they are cognitively represented, and how they emerge and become conventionalized within a community. One influential approach is that abstract concepts are based on conceptual metaphors. This study investigates the emergence and conventionalization of abstract concepts and metaphors in an experimental-semiotic referential communication game in which participants communicate abstract concepts and metaphors via drawing. The study sheds light on the different strategies participants use to evoke abstract concepts and shows that participants decrease the number of strategies they use over subsequent rounds of interaction, converging on more successful strategies and thereby initiating a joint process of conventionalization. Acknowledgements: This research is part of the project No. 2021/43/P/HS2/02729 co-funded by the National Science Centre and the European Union Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under the Marie Skodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 945339.

Conventionalization of Graphic Representations of Abstract Concepts and Metaphors in an Experimental-Semiotic Communication Game

Much research examining the development of semantic knowledge has focused on patterns of co-occurrence in language. An often-made distinction concerns ‘local’ co-occurrences (word pairs that appear close together) and ‘global’ co-occurrences (word pairs that appear in similar linguistic contexts), with some recent accounts arguing that only local co-occurrences are exploitable by young children. We tested the alternative view that this dichotomy may be misaligned with natural language input. First, we performed a descriptive analysis of the co-occurrence structure present in the input. This analysis suggests that global co-occurrences are frequent in the input to children. Second, we performed a descriptive analysis of the semantic information encoded by local and global statistics in the CHILDES corpus; this analysis suggests that both local and global co-occurrences encode patterns of similarity that could support the acquisition of structured semantic representations.

Are Global Statistics Discarded Statistics? An Investigation of What Types of  Co-Occurrence Statistics Could Support the Acquisition of Semantic Knowledge

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The Effects of Congruent and Systematic Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences on Novel Word Learning

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