United States

Mental imagery is a core topic in cognitive science and central to most perception and action theories. Although mental imagery is often experimentally elicited, a growing body of literature highlights that people differ in their ability to consciously experience mental imagery with some reporting an inability to experience imagery. We examine the relationship between mental imagery vividness and performance on blind reach tasks within a VR environment. The findings indicated that accuracy did not significantly differ based on differences in imagery vividness during a baseline blind reach task. However, participants who reported experiencing more vivid mental imagery and received terminal visual feedback during a recalibration phase demonstrated greater shifts in movement strategy post-recalibration compared to those with less vivid imagery. The results indicate a degree of ‘perceptual learning’ following limited visual feedback that was predicted by vividness of imagery and feedback type. Implications for perception and action theory are discussed.

CogSci 2021

The Relationship Between Mental Imagery Vividness and Blind Reaching Performance

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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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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


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

Cognitive science is itself a cognitive activity. Yet, computational cognitive science tools are seldom used to study (limits of) cognitive scientists' thinking. Here, we do so using computational-level modeling and complexity analysis. We present an idealized formal model of a core inference problem faced by cognitive scientists: Given observations of a system's behaviors, infer cognitive processes that could plausibly produce the behavior. We consider variants of this problem at different levels of explanation and prove that at each level, the inference problem is intractable, or even uncomputable. We discuss the implications for cognitive science.

How hard is cognitive science?

Hippocampal replay is not a simple recapitulation of recent experience, with awake replay often unrolling in reverse temporal order upon receipt of reward, in a manner dependent on reward magnitude. These findings have led to the proposal that replay serves to update values in accordance with reinforcement learning theories. We argue that there may be a more parsimonious account of these observations involving simple associations between contexts and experiences: During wakefulness, animals associate experiences with the contexts in which they are encoded, in a manner modulated by the salience of each experience. During periods of quiescence, replay emerges when contextual cues trigger a cascade of reactivations driven by the reinstatement of each memory’s encoding context, which in turn facilitates memory consolidation. Our theory unifies numerous replay phenomena, including findings that reinforcement learning models fail to account for.

Hippocampal replay as context-driven memory reactivation

How do we manage to understand the minds of others and usefully interact with them? In the last decade, the debate on these issues has developed from unitary to pluralist approaches. According to the latter, we make use of multiple socio-cognitive strategies when predicting, interpretating, and reacting to the behavior of others. This means a departure from the view of mindreading as the main strategy underlying social cognition. In this paper, we address the question of the controversial status of mindreading within such a pluralist framework. Contrary to many other accounts, we ascribe mindreading an equal status in a pluralist framework. Mindreading is required for a variety of central situations in life and importantly underlies the way in which we understand other people. Mindreading is also no less reliable than alternative strategies; reliability is not so much a matter of different competing socio-cognitive strategies, but rather of their complementary use.

The Role of Mindreading in a Pluralist Framework of Social Cognition

The Remote Associates Test is a creativity task that consists in finding a word that connects three unrelated words. We examined EEG power in healthy participants performing an adaptation of this task that allowed us to explore two mechanisms: remote semantic combination by varying the associative strength between the cue words and the solution, and the insight phenomenon reported by the subjects. Time-frequency analyses revealed that associative remoteness was associated with early synchronization in alpha and beta bands in laterotemporal and temporoparietal clusters and late frontal activity in the theta band just before the participants found the solution. Insight was associated with synchronization in alpha and gamma bands in inferotemporal clusters and a frontal synchronization in the theta band just preceded the response. Our findings provide new insights on the dynamic mechanisms involved in this verbal creativity task.

Time course of EEG oscillations during creative problem solving

There is a growing interest in alternative explanations to the dual-system account of how people learn category structures varying in their optimal decision bounds (unidimensional and information-integration structures). Recognition memory performance and hippocampal activation patterns in these tasks are two interesting findings, which have not been formally explained. Here, we carry out a formal simulation with SUSTAIN (Love, Medin, & Gureckis, 2004), an adaptive model of category learning, which had great success in accounting for recognition memory performance and fMRI activity patterns. We show, for the first time, that a formal single-system model of category learning can accommodate recognition performance after learning and is consistent with fMRI data obtained while participants learned these structures.

SUSTAIN captures category learning, recognition, and hippocampal activation in a unidimensional vs information-integration task

Primate inferotemporal cortex (ITC) neurons respond with declining strength to repeated presentations of large natural images. This phenomenon - repetition suppression - has been assumed to arise at the level of ITC because ITC neurons possess the large receptive fields and sophisticated selectivity to recognize images as repetitions. It was recently discovered that V2 neurons exhibit repetition suppression under identical conditions. How do V2 neurons, with classical receptive fields encompassing only a small fraction of the image, recognize it as a repetition? One possibility is that they are sensitive to repetition of content outside the classical receptive field, in the surround. To assess this, we recorded neuronal responses to displays while independently controlling repetition of elements in the classical receptive field and the surround. We found that content in the surround contributed to repetition suppression and that this occurred relatively late in the response, consistent with being mediated by feedback.

Contribution of receptive field center and surround to repetition suppression in macaque visual area V2

Normal aging is associated with an increase in word finding problems. Competing explanations posit that age impairs access to phonological representations (transmission deficit) or leads to a deterioration of semantic representations (under-activation). Because these accounts are difficult to disentangle in a highly interactive language system, we employed a neuro-biologically grounded spiking network model which was lesioned to reflect transmission deficits or under-activation. Results of three simulated picture naming paradigms were in line with the transmission deficit account that normal aging impairs access to representations during word production. These initial findings suggest that this is a promising approach for understanding age-related changes to language ability in an interactive system.

AgeNet: A Neurobiological Model of Age-related Word Retrieval Deficits

How are emotions understood to relate to other aspects of mental life? Among US adults, concepts of mental life are anchored by a distinction between physiological sensations (BODY), social-emotional abilities (HEART), and perceptual-cognitive capacities (MIND); these conceptual units are in place by 7-9y (Weisman et al., 2017a, 2017b, 2018). Here we reanalyze these datasets to explore the structural relationships among BODY, HEART, and MIND. Across six studies (N=1758), adults’ assessments of the mental lives of robots, beetles, birds, goats, and other entities revealed a clear hierarchical structure: social-emotional abilities were virtually never granted to any entity perceived to lack physiological sensations or perceptual-cognitive abilities. This is consistent with a folk theory—similar to prominent theories in affective science—in which emotions emerge from the combination of more basic capacities for sensation and cognition. Studies of US children (4-9y, N=445) suggest that it takes years for children to acquire this understanding.

Emotions as the product of body and mind: The hierarchical structure of folk concepts of mental life among US adults and children

People from Western and East Asian cultures exhibit systematic differences in perception, attention, and cognition. Why do people from these cultures think differently? According to an influential proposal, psychological differences between Westerners and East Asians reflect, and may derive from, differences between ancient Greek and ancient Chinese philosophies. Here, we critique this proposal in two ways. First, we argue that the way ancient Greek philosophy is represented in the cultural psychology literature is skewed, highlighting differences between ancient Greek and Chinese beliefs, and obscuring similarities. Second, we argue that no causal mechanism has been offered by which ancient philosophies could give rise to modern cross-cultural differences.

Do Ancient Philosophies Help Us Understand Modern Psychologies?

This paper proposes a formalized approach to the specification of experimental tasks in cognitive science. Put briefly, the proposal is to represent the structure of a task by a logic program that accepts only valid experimental event logs for the chosen paradigm. It is argued that the proposed approach stands to benefit the research process at various stages as it involves the creation of executable documentation for experimental tasks, which may facilitate the communication, validation, implementation, and analysis of experimental tasks. A worked example is presented in detail and some potential new directions of research at the intersection of psychology and computer science are discussed.

The Relationship Between Mental Imagery Vividness and Blind Reaching Performance

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