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When given unrestricted time to process an image, people are faster and more accurate at making categorical decisions about a depicted object (e.g., Labrador) if it is close in sensorimotor and linguistic distributional experience to its target category concept (e.g., dog). In this preregistered study, we examined whether sensorimotor and linguistic distributional information affect object categorisation differently as a function of time available for perceptual processing. Using an ultrarapid categorisation paradigm with backwards masking, we systematically varied onset timing (SOA) of a post-stimulus mask (17-133ms) following a briefly displayed (17ms) object. Preliminary results suggest that linguistic distributional distance between concept and category (e.g., Labrador → dog), but not sensorimotor distance, affects categorisation accuracy and RT even in rapid categorisation, and that these effects do not vary systematically by SOA. These findings support the role of a linguistic shortcut (i.e., using linguistic distributional instead of sensorimotor information) in rapid object categorisation.

CogSci 2021

Linguistic distributional information about object labels affects ultrarapid object categorization

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

**Your Program Chairs,**
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**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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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.

poster

Remembering names is generally considered a difficult task. The face-name mnemonic strategy enhances encoding of face-name associations using a name transformation, a prominent facial feature, and interactive imagery. Name recall involves mentally retracing these steps. However, the components of the face-name mnemonic strategy are relatively unexplored. The present study tested the effectiveness of variants of the face-name mnemonic strategy in comparison to an uninstructed group for learning face-name associations. Experiment 1 demonstrated a significant advantage of the name-transformation mnemonic strategy compared to the uninstructed approach. Experiment 2 further examines the name-transformation mnemonic strategy with young adults. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of a variation of the face-name mnemonic strategy with implications for memory rehabilitation interventions.

The effectiveness of face-name mnemonics on name recall

Many researchers have demonstrated the change of body representation, including the rubber hand illusion and pinocchio illusion. However, they focused on the change of a single body part. The human body has a symmetric structure; therefore, the modification of body representation can be facilitated by the corresponding movement of symmetric parts. In our four experiments, participants moved their hands in different manners with distorted vision and were measured whether their behavior changed throughout the task. The four tasks differed in whether participant's hands were moving simultaneously or separately and whether they moved their hands to the same point or a different point. A behavioral change occurred in all experiments. When the participants moved their hands to the same point simultaneously the greatest behavioral change was facilitated. Neither moving both hands simultaneously or moving to the same position facilitated the change.

Change of Body Representation in Symmetric Body Parts

How should we represent social categories? Essentialism, which posits an internal category essence, has negative consequences such as group-based generalization and intolerance of nonconformity. Structural representations, which consider categories as situated in a larger context, could be more constructive. When considering a neutral context, adults who learned a structural (food availability) cause for a novel group’s diet, versus a biological (allergies, digestion) or cultural (taboo) cause, generalized in a context-sensitive manner, considered nonconformity to be more possible and acceptable, and suggested intervening on the structural context rather than the group to change the property. When considering social stratification, adults who learned a structural (discrimination) cause for a novel group working a low-status job, versus a biological (physically well-suited) or cultural (traditions/values) cause, showed more context-sensitive generalization, considered the present disparity to be more unacceptable, and suggested more structural interventions. Structural representations may consequently be a more constructive alternative to essentialism.

Let’s talk structure: the positive consequences of structural representations

It has been shown that in hand-written transcription tasks temporal micro-behavioural chunk signals hold promise as measures of competence in various domains (e.g., Cheng, 2014). But data capture under that an approach requires the use of graphics tablets which are relatively uncommon. In this theoretical paper we propose and explore an alternative method – Competence Assessment by Stimulus Matching (CASM). This new method uses simple mouse-driven interfaces to produce temporal chunk signals as measures of learner’s ability. However, it is not obvious what features of CASM will produce effective competence measures and the design space of CASM tasks is large. Thus, this paper uses GOMS modelling in order to explore the design space to find factors that will maximize the discrimination of chunk measures of competence. The modelling results of this paper show that CASM has potential in using chunk signals to measure competence in the domain of English language.

Competence Assessment by Stimulus Matching: An Application of GOMS to Assess Chunks in Memory

Spacing out information promotes retention more than massing information – a robust finding in psychological science. Research on the spacing effect has primarily manipulated aspects of the learning schedule (e.g., item repetitions, retention interval). Limited work has considered how familiarity with the to-be-learned information impacts the spacing effect. The current study addressed this gap by examining how word frequency/familiarity affects retention on a massed or spaced schedule. One-hundred adults were presented with 24 high familiarity (e.g., apple), low familiarity (e.g., vestige), or nonsense (e.g., blicket) words on a massed and spaced schedule. Retrieval was tested after a 5-minute delay, revealing a significant spacing effect regardless of word familiarity. Furthermore, overall performance was significantly greater for highly familiar items. These results suggest that spacing is effective regardless of general word familiarity. Future studies will assess how learners’ prior knowledge of test items – as measured by a vocabulary test – impacts the spacing effect.

Does the spacing effect depend on prior knowledge? Evaluating the role of word familiarity in learning from spaced vs. massed schedules

When learning to bind visual symbols to sounds, to what extent do beginning readers track seemingly irrelevant information such as a symbol’s position within a visual display? In this study, we used adult typical readers’ own webcams to track their eye movements during a paired associate learning task that arbitrarily bound unfamiliar characters with monosyllabic pseudowords. Overall, participants’ error rate in recognition (Phase 1) decreased as a function of exposure, but was not modulated by the episodic memory-based effect of ‘looking-at-nothing’. Moreover, participants’ lowest error rate in both recognition and recall (Phases 1 and 2) was associated with item consistency across multiple exposures, in terms of spatial and contextual properties (i.e., stimulus’ screen location and co-occurrences with specific distractor items during encoding). Taken together, our findings suggest that normally developing readers extract statistical regularities in the input during visual-phonological associative learning, leading to rapid acquisition of these pre-orthographic representations.

Episodic Memory Cues in Acquisition of Novel Visual-Phonological Associations: a Webcam-Based Eye-Tracking Study

In collaborative tasks, humans can make better joint decisions by aggregating individual information in proportion to their communicated confidence (Bahrami et al., 2010). However, if people blindly rely on their partner’s confidence expressions, they could easily reach suboptimal solutions when their collaborator's confidence judgments are not calibrated to their performance, but for instance exhibit an overconfidence bias. Given that calibrated advisers are rated as more credible (Sah et al., 2013), we propose that prior experience with a collaborator will lead to a recalibration of their confidence judgements before incorporating their advice. In an online experiment, participants first viewed two other fictitious participants, one calibrated and one biased, perform a categorization task. Following this, participants completed a similar task by taking advice from just one of the two previously observed advisers on a given trial. We tested whether participants chose the adviser who had the trial-by-trial highest expressed or recalibrated confidence.

Do humans recalibrate the confidence of advisers?

We perceive and categorize the world constrained by the restrictions of our sensory and neural systems. Additionally, naming modulates how we categorize the things we see. Here we explore a third influence on visual categorization, we study how the perceived statistical regularities of shapes and colors modulate our experience in categorizing objects. We conducted our analyses in artificial systems. We used computer vision to process pictures of real objects, and artificial neural networks to categorize them. We found that the statistical regularities of different object sets produced either shape or color biases, depending on the nature of the set. Our statistical-based categorization approach presents complementary mechanisms of categorization biases, relevant for a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic shape bias, the color bias of food, and it let us hypothesize why categorization may vary across populations.

The Statistical Properties of Color and Shape of Objects in Visual Categorization

Human Theory of Mind enables us to attribute mental states like beliefs and desires based on how other people act. However, in many social interactions (particularly ones that lack observable action), people also directly think about other people's thinking. Here we present a computational framework, Bayesian inverse reasoning, for thinking about other people's thoughts. Our framework formalizes inferences about thinking by inferring a generative model of reasoning decisions and computational processes, structured around a principle of rational mental effort -- the idea that people expect other agents to allocate thinking rationally. We show that this model quantitatively predicts human judgements in a task where participants must infer the mental causes behind an agent's pauses as they navigate and solve a maze. Our results contribute to our understanding of the richness of the human ability to think about other minds, and to even think about thinking itself.

hinking about thinking through inverse reasoning

In this experiment, we investigated the role of dimensional distinctiveness on the generalization of novel names for unfamiliar objects. In a comparison design, we manipulated the sequence of trials difficulty, starting either with more difficult trials or with easier trials. To achieve this, we manipulated the dimensional distinctiveness of the first comparison trials and of the, later, transfer trials. Results showed that high-distinctiveness (easy) stimuli increased children’s later performance in the low-distinctiveness (difficult) condition whereas low-distinctiveness early training led to no later improvement in easier trials. Last, a correct answer for the first trial in the first learning part predicted the level of performance in the second learning part. We interpret these findings in terms of differential costs of comparison for varying levels of distinctiveness and level of abstraction from one condition to another.

Linguistic distributional information about object labels affects ultrarapid object categorization

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The effectiveness of face-name mnemonics on name recall

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