United States

Is virtual reality (VR) necessary to conduct complex immersive eye-tracking studies or can similar data be recorded and analyzed in the real world? 

We adapted a spatial navigation paradigm from VR to the real city Limassol. Specifically, we combined a free exploration of 130 min with two pointing tasks while recording eye-tracking, head-tracking and GPS data. We labeled the eye-tracking data with a new classification pipeline and found a similar gaze distribution over object categories in both the real world and VR. Furthermore, we hand-labeled fixations on buildings to apply a graph-theoretical analysis. When comparing our results with VR we found some differences (e.g. graph density, diameter), but also many similarities in viewing behavior (e.g. hierarchy index, gaze-graph-defined landmarks).  

Overall, our work showcases the feasibility of complex eye-tracking experiments in the real world and highlights the similarity of viewing behavior in both the real world and virtual reality.

CogSci 2025

Eye tracking in the real world: a graph-theoretical analysis and comparison to virtual realty

case studies

cognitive neuropsychology

spatial cognition

eye tracking

vision

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair:<br>
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for  Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025.  ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am  deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.*<br>
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)<br><br><br>



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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

<div style="position:relative;padding-top:0;width:900px;height:500px;"><iframe style="position:absolute;border:none;width:100%;height:100%;left:0;top:0;" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/amvr/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>

#### 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. 
<br><br>
* **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.
<br><br>
* **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.
<br><br>

#### 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.

Walking, traditionally considered an automated process, can become cognitively demanding during dual-task (DT). Up to now, language-motor interactions, such as walking and listening to speech remain underexplored in DT studies, despite the frequent co-occurrence of these activities in daily life. In addition, research on embodied semantics points at the potential of certain words’ meaning interacting with actual body movements. Yet no study so far has addressed this issue in relation to gait. This ongoing experiment examines a) the potential motor-cognitive interference of concurrent walking and speech processing and b) the potential semantic effects when action verbs are actively processed during walking. We tested 20 adults using motion capture with concurrent optical imaging (fNIRS) to assess gait variation along with frontal and motor cortex activation. Preliminary findings suggest that gait patterns remain consistent with and without speech processing during walking. However, processing action-related verbs while walking is associated with reduced motor cortex activation.

Cognitive and motor dynamics of speech processing during walking

Computer-based assessments enable the collection of fine-grained response process data through log files. We propose a novel method for extracting latent dimensions from such multidimensional response timing data, based on applying the Weighted MDS (WMDS) model. In our method, dissimilarities among examinees in their response timing vectors are computed, one such matrix for each test item, then WMDS is applied to this collection of matrices. The resulting latent dimensions represent variation among examinees in their patterns of response timing variables, with the dimension weights of the WMDS model reflecting differences across items in the importance of the latent dimensions. Latent dimensions are interpreted via permutation-based importance, correlation analysis and network analysis. Our method is demonstrated using response data from the PISA 2018 Reading and Mathematics assessments. Results show that the extracted latent dimensions are statistically reliable, educationally interpretable, and boost predictive accuracy when used in conjunction with item scores.

Extracting Latent Dimensions from Multidimensional Response Timing Data

Compounding is a common word formation process in many
languages around the world. Previous semantic analyses of
compounding suggest that analogy and composition are cru-
cial cognitive processes that underlie the formation of new
compounds, but these processes are typically considered sep-
arately. Here, we formulate a computational model of com-
pounding that integrates both analogy and composition. Com-
pared to simpler baselines, we show that the model combining
both processes achieves the best performance in predicting the
constituents of attested compounds in English, Chinese, and
German. Our work extends previous semantic-based accounts
of compounding via a computational approach that can be eval-
uated using large-scale crosslinguistic data

Modelling compounding across languages with analogy and composition

Can children detect a lie when the liar unintentionally reveals essential information (displaying so-called semantic leakage)? Furthermore, because previous research found that theory of mind (ToM) is a factor in children’s lie production ability, what role does ToM play in their lie detection ability? An experiment was carried out with 128 Dutch-speaking children (4 - 14 years old). Children’s lie detection ability was assessed using a story in which one of the characters produced a lie signalled by semantic leakage. A false-belief task was used to test children’s first-order ToM (Kevin thinks that…) and second-order ToM (Marieke thinks that Kevin thinks that…). Children were 73% accurate in identifying the liar by referring to semantic leakage. Their performance improved with age, with 12-year-olds showing ceiling performance. Finaly, first-order ToM was a significant predictor, even after controlling for age, suggesting that lie production and lie detection partly rely on shared cognitive functions.

It takes one to know one: Theory of mind helps children to detect lies that are revealed by semantic leakage

Research shows that shape perception is sensitive to both roundedness or angularity (e.g., Bar&Neta, 2006) and symmetry (e.g., Dehaene et al., 2006), and that these features also affect the perception of similarity (Tversky, 1977). Roundness is the measure of how closely the shape of an object approaches that of a circle. In an online quasi-experiment (n=74), we tested combination pairs of 19 geometric figures (created according to symmetry properties and roundedness) to answer the question whether the symmetry would contribute more than the roundedness of the figure corners to the roundness perception. Participants did a forced choice task on figure pairs presented in a random order. The results show that for regular polygons, roundedness determines the similarity assessment even when the symmetry is up to three orders higher. For pairs containing regular figures, choices were made faster compared to pairs with asymmetrical and non-regular figures.

Roundedness and symmetry in the perception of similarity to the circle or roundness

Shared book reading is widely acknowledged for its positive impact on language development, as it exposes children to complex linguistic structures not typically encountered in daily conversation. However, the mechanisms through which shared reading supports language acquisition remain less well understood. This study investigates the effects of speech complexity and gesture use on children's real-time word learning from books. Using a dual head-mounted eye-tracking paradigm, we assessed gaze dynamics in 18- to 24-month-old children during naturalistic book reading with their parents. Our findings indicate that while parental speech is rich in linguistic diversity, children at this age exhibit a preference for simpler sentence structures. Simpler sentences and imperatives, particularly when paired with child gestures, appear to capture children’s attention most effectively. This study emphasizes the interplay between speech complexity, gesture, visual attention, and word learning, demonstrating that multimodal input plays a critical role in facilitating language acquisition.

The Roles of Speech Complexity and Pointing Gesture in Guiding Children’s Attention During Shared Book Reading

Embodied cognition theory posits cognition as fundamentally situated within and enacted through the affective and physical body and environment. Grounding in this theoretical perspective, we investigate learners’ fluctuations in arousal state in the context of a math pedagogical tool, Balance Board Math, that invites children to explore concepts through bodily movement on rockable boards. Balance Board Math’s design invites bodily movement as both a means to explore mathematical concepts and as a means to provide affectively-regulating sensory input to the vestibular (balance) sense. In this pilot analysis, we explore data collected with electrodermal activity wristbands (N = 9017 from 6 participants) to examine how their arousal states varied in relation to their cognitive-affective-physical activity as they explored and learned concepts through Balance Board Math movement-based activities. Using a mixed-effects regression model, we analyze how bodily rocking movements with different situated meaning within learners’ problem-solving, as well as the impact of reaching fluency within each activity, impacted their arousal. We found that rocking movements undertaken to generate graphs had the opposite impact on arousal from non-instrumental rocking movements, and that reaching fluency with enacting and explaining solutions to movement-based math problems was associated with reduced arousal. These findings highlight the interplay of cognitive and physical drivers of arousal regulation in embodied learning environments.

Exploring the Impact of Cognitive and Sensorimotor Activity on Arousal in an Embodied Learning Environment

Many of the self-regulated learning (SRL) skills and academic emotional regulation (AER) strategies of student life remain hidden. iSense continuous sensing app provides a novel method to monitor and assess the impact of social interactions, sleep patterns, app usage, and mobility on SRL skills and AER strategies. In a year-long study involving 211 university students, the iSense collected behavioral data from smartphones continuously and unobtrusively. The results revealed significant correlations between passive sensor data and SRL/AER self-reports such as task strategies, time management, situational selection, and social support. These findings enhance our understanding of students' learning and emotional regulation behaviors while offering a foundation for personalized learning support tools based on mobile sensing. By applying dynamic behavioral data, iSense demonstrates its potential for advancing contextualized learning analytics and psychological intervention systems.

A preliminary study to Assess Self-regulated learning and Academic Emotional Regulation of College Students Using Smartphones

In daily life, we frequently interact with specialists—individuals whose complementary insights augment our limited first-hand experiences in decision-making. Efficient as this may be, the cognitive demands of employing our theory of mind to determine and integrate the evidential contributions of diverse specialists may offset its benefits. In this study, we explore human judgments in a scenario where they must aggregate opinions from multiple social peers, each possessing expertise in a different aspect of the problem. We examine whether participants integrate specialist judgments with or without mentalizing using a normative Bayesian model and propose two heuristic approaches. Our results show the majority of participants across two experiments relied on heuristics, suggesting that people don’t tend to or have limited ability to integrate specialist judgments through mentalizing.

Integrating Specialist Judgments With and Without Mentalizing

Social learning enables humans to aggregate distributed information, but this process becomes challenging when evidence is sparse, unevenly distributed across social networks, or unrepresentative of the true state of the world.
In this study, we ask how different forms of communication—direct belief reports versus natural language discussion—affect groups' ability to overcome these epistemic challenges?
We test this question in an experiment with $N=1,236$ participants performing a collective inference task in networked groups.
We found that while belief reports were adequate when evidence was abundant and representative, natural language proved crucial under challenging conditions.
Groups using natural language achieved significantly more accurate collective estimates, and this advantage was amplified when private information was less reliable.
These findings suggest that computational models of collective behavior must account for how communication channels interact with epistemic conditions to shape group learning outcomes.

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Cognitive and motor dynamics of speech processing during walking

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