United States

Fantasy/symbolic play is central to theories of child cognitive development (Piaget 1962; Pellegrini 1985; Leslie 1987; Francis &amp; Gibson 2022). Most studies suggest that children distinguish pretense from reality by their second year, though the cognitive mechanisms involved remain debated (Leslie 1987). Fantasy play is also linked to language development, including early literacy and metalinguistic awareness (Pellegrini &amp; Galda 1982, 1991; Pellegrini 1984; Orr &amp; Geva 2015). Garvey &amp; Kramer (1989) identify two communicative levels in symbolic play: (i) enactment and (ii) emplotment. This study examines the grammar used by L1 Greek children while setting up scenes and giving instructions. Based on novel naturalistic data from 55 recorded sessions with 14 children (aged 2;7–6;4), we show that by 2;7, children produce counterfactual scenarios with a light verb meaning ‘pretend’. By 5;0, they employ counterfactual morphological marking in symbolic play before using it in other contexts (Amsel &amp; Smalley 2000).

CogSci 2025

Fantasy Play and the Language of Emplotment in Greek L1 Children

language and thought

theory of mind

decision making

language acquisition

morphology

pragmatics

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

Join us!

<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
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#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
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CogSci 2023

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Fantasy/symbolic play is central to theories of child cognitive development (Piaget 1962; Pellegrini 1985; Leslie 1987; Francis & Gibson 2022). Most studies suggest that children distinguish pretense from reality by their second year, though the cognitive mechanisms involved remain debated (Leslie 1987). Fantasy play is also linked to language development, including early literacy and metalinguistic awareness (Pellegrini & Galda 1982, 1991; Pellegrini 1984; Orr & Geva 2015). Garvey & Kramer (1989) identify two communicative levels in symbolic play: (i) enactment and (ii) emplotment. This study examines the grammar used by L1 Greek children while setting up scenes and giving instructions. Based on novel naturalistic data from 55 recorded sessions with 14 children (aged 2;7–6;4), we show that by 2;7, children produce counterfactual scenarios with a light verb meaning ‘pretend’. By 5;0, they employ counterfactual morphological marking in symbolic play before using it in other contexts (Amsel & Smalley 2000).

poster

### 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. 
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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 growing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) prompts reflections on the nature of human identity, particularly regarding perceptions of human uniqueness. Adolescents today interact with AI more frequently than any previous generation, yet little is known about the psychological implications of AI on their development. This study explores the associations among AI usage, anthropomorphism, and perceived human uniqueness in adolescents. Through a survey with 487 adolescents aged 13 to 19, we found 1) older adolescents perceived less agency and experience in humans compared to younger ones, whereas no age-related differences were observed in AI usage, anthropomorphic tendency, and perceptions of AI; 2) higher AI usage and anthropomorphic tendency were associated with reduced perceptions of human uniqueness in both agency and experience; and 3) anthropomorphism could serve as a psychological mechanism linking AI usage and perceived human uniqueness. This study contributes to broader philosophical and societal discussions about AI and human uniqueness.

Exploring Associations Among AI Usage, Anthropomorphism, and Perceived Human Uniqueness in Adolescents

A growing body of research suggests the presence of an attentional component in the memory advantage of animate items. Most research on this animacy effect is focused on remembering, but its effects on forgetting are less well-researched. With the use of pupillometry, we investigated the attentional processes present in the selective remembering and directed forgetting of animate and inanimate items. More specifically, we investigated whether external and internal attention are affected by the animacy status of to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten words in an item-method directed forgetting task with retro cues, followed by a recognition task for all previously presented items. Our behavioral results demonstrate the directed forgetting effect: accuracy on the recognition task was higher for to-be-remembered words than for to-be-forgotten words. Additionally, we found an advantage of animacy, with higher accuracy for animate words than for inanimate words, regardless of cue. The pupillometry results demonstrate differential internal attention for to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten words during cueing, with larger pupil sizes for remember cues than for forget cues, but no effect of animacy. We did however find an animacy effect on external attention during stimulus presentation, with smaller pupil sizes for animate words than for inanimate words, which may reflect precision of encoding. This suggests that not internal attention, but external attention is influenced by animacy status, potentially explaining the memory advantage of animate items through the richness-of-encoding hypothesis.

Assessing the Role of Attention in the Animacy Effect Through Directed Forgetting

Children develop an understanding of privacy through experiences in both real and virtual contexts. As technology becomes central to their lives, it is crucial to explore how they navigate privacy in digital environments. This study examined children’s application of privacy norms in a digital photo-sharing context and tested whether a privacy intervention could improve their understanding. In Experiment 1, 85 children (ages 5–8 years) and in Experiment 2, 35 children (ages 5–7 years) listened to a story about Sally, who appeared as a cartoon and a real person. Children decided whether Sally should allow a game to take her picture in different settings. Older children judged taking real Sally’s picture as less permissible than cartoon Sally’s. Experiment 2 introduced a privacy intervention, which influenced judgments equally across both versions of Sally. These findings suggest that children’s privacy reasoning develops with age and can be shaped by targeted interventions.

Examining Children’s Applications of Privacy Norms in a Digital, Photo-Sharing Game

This study further explored a novel reasoning error. When faced with evidence from multiple sources, a substantial number of lay reasoners inaccurately integrate cues of reliability and report number. Particularly when further reports are less reliable than initial (highly reliable) reports. When evaluating the added value of supplementary corroborative reports, we find that, in most instances, participants are equally likely to provide correct or incorrect qualitative judgements. When using a sequential presentation and explicitly prompting participants to consider the impact of additional credible evidence, 36.7%-45% indicate that their beliefs should remain the same and 10% or less indicate that their beliefs should decrease. Only a third correctly believed that in each instance of corroborating evidence the likelihood of the target hypothesis should increase. Qualitative judgements also significantly impacted the accuracy of belief estimates; deviations from normative, Bayesian, predictions at the group level are explained by sub-groups with incorrect qualitative intuitions.

Evaluating testimony from multiple witnesses: exploring qualitative intuitions

Polysemy is pervasive in language use and plays a crucial role in enabling the boundless expressive capacity of human language. Semantic extension based on metaphorical associations has been argued to be a key process in words acquiring novel, additional meanings (Anderson, 2017). In this poster, we report the results of an artificial language learning study in which participants had to extend the meaning of previously learned items to refer to new referents. We hypothesised that participants would choose semantic extensions based on metaphoric associations proposed by Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2010). The results indicate that participants seem to make systematic use of salient semantic and metaphoric associations and mappings when having to extend the meanings of learned form-meaning pairings from concrete items to more complex and abstract referents. However only in some cases did participants perform semantic extensions according to our prediction based on CMT.

Metaphor, Polysemy and Semantic Extension in an Artificial Language Learning Experiment

Detecting objects in the environment, and forming a sense of confidence in these decisions typically involves multisensory processing. We sought to characterize how humans form amodal and modality-specific confidence judgments during audiovisual detection. We found that participants made more accurate detection and confidence judgments for audiovisual than unimodal stimuli. To explain these results, we extended a Bayesian evidence accumulation model to audiovisual detection and successfully reproduced both unimodal and audiovisual detection judgments. Despite being fitted to decisions and decision times alone, our model accurately reproduced modality-specific confidence. It failed, however, to account for amodal confidence, suggesting that the latter might not arise from optimal signal integration in detection contexts. Our results indicate that, in the presence of audiovisual signals, different integration rules apply for perceptual and metacognitive decisions.

An Ideal Observer Model of Audiovisual Detection Captures Modality-Specific, but not Amodal, Confidence Ratings

Empathy is a widely used and poorly understood concept, in spite of the significant intellectual thought that has been devoted to elucidating its meaning. Rather than focusing on the semantics of empathy, we explore its telos and utility—particularly in clinical care—through analyses of the "double empathy problem" and Theory of Mind, along with thought experiments drawn from healthcare scenarios. We find that although cognitive and affective empathy are often considered essential components of treating others with care and respect, they are neither sufficient nor clearly necessary for achieving these aims in clinical contexts. In fact, both varieties of empathy can easily lead to detrimental social outcomes. With this in mind, we suggest de-emphasizing the role of empathy in clinical culture. A clearer focus on actionable strategies and behaviors which facilitate positive patient-clinician interactions may help demystify “soft skills,” thus making competence in social aspects of healthcare more accessible to all.

Care Beyond Empathy: Towards a More Accessible Theory of Prosocial Clinician-Patient Interaction

In several cognitive tasks involving categorization, function learning, or artificial grammar learning, judgements can made on the basis of rules, i.e. abstract and general information about structure, or on the similarity of current instances to previously encountered instances. In this paper, we examine two behavioural markers for rule- and similarity-based processes in language learning: learning trajectories and generalisation performance. A rule-based process is expected to generate a sudden increase in performance after the correct rule is acquired. A similarity-based process is expected to generate a gradually increasing trajectory. Generalisation is operationalized as the difference in performance between test items that were encountered in training and new items. Performance under a rule-based process is expected to be same for both types, as an extracted rule can be applied equally well. Better performance for old instances compared to new implies a similarity based process. We utilise data from a study by Menks et al. (2022) where participants were implicitly exposed to grammatical rules of Icelandic, and perform grammaticality judgement tasks across several sessions. We apply a Bayesian latent mixture model to analyse individual trajectories and classify them as step-wise or gradual. We find individual differences in how performance changes over time, as well as differences in generalisation performance. However, the expected underlying process based on trajectories and generalisation performance for participants do not converge. The form of learning trajectory of an individual was not related to generalisation ability. Future research is required to test if a step-wise or gradual learning trajectory is exclusive to a rule-based or similarity-based process.

Learning Trajectories and Generalization: Converging markers for Rule- and Similarity-based Processes in Grammar Learning?

‘Statistical significance’ is more than just a label. Cognitive psychological theories suggest it may represent a mental concept of a category of p-values due to the pervasive practice of dichotomous interpretation of p-values. This paper builds on previous research identifying categorical boundary effects in the initial information processing of p-values by examining the encoding and retrieval of p-values embedded in the context of scientific abstracts. A sample of 30 U.S. graduate students in the psychological sciences read blocks of abstracts, then were prompted to recall certain details, including p-values. Results show that memory for p-values was skewed away from the .05 boundary, suggesting that training in dichotomous ‘p < .05’ thinking may lead to categorical biases in memory for p-values. These results set up experiments to test mechanistic hypotheses of boundary effects on statistical cognition as well as the efficacy of teaching interventions to address and ameliorate these categorical biases.

A “p < .05” Boundary Effect in the Encoding and Retrieval of p-values from Scientific Texts

Humans are intuitive mindreaders. We use our Theory of Mind to infer other people’s mental states based on how they behave. Yet, humans are also motivated to ensure that others can infer their mental states easily and accurately. However, to act on this motivation, we must have tools to help others efficiently understand our minds, particularly when our behavior could be misunderstood. We propose that interjections—simple vocalizations like oh, oops, and ew—are an important set of linguistic devices designed to reveal our mental states quickly and efficiently. We provide initial evidence for this account, showing that people believe that interjections ought to be used as if they were designed to broadcast mental states and that people spontaneously produce these interjections significantly more often in the presence of an observer. Our work sheds light on how humans are not only proficient mindreaders, but may also be adept mindsharers.

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Exploring Associations Among AI Usage, Anthropomorphism, and Perceived Human Uniqueness in Adolescents

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