United States

A number of studies have explored whether language is grounded in action and perception, however little attention has been given to the sense of smell. Here we directly test whether olfactory information is necessary for comprehension of odor-related language, by comparing language performance in a group of participants with no sense of smell (anosmics) with a group of control participants with an intact sense of smell. We found no difference in comprehension of odor- and taste-related language between anosmics and controls using a lexical decision task, suggesting olfaction is not crucial to semantic representations of odor-related language. However, we did find that anosmics were better at remembering odor-related words than controls, and they also rated odor- and taste-related words as more positively valenced than control participants. We suggest odor-related language is more salient and emotional to anosmics because it reminds them of their missing sense. Overall, this study supports the proposal that odor-related language is not grounded in odor perception.

CogSci 2021

Can losing the sense of smell affect odor language?

Welcome Seabirders!  

Welcome to Virtual World Seabird Conference 3 - vWSC3! Whether you are in your office or lab, at home, in a coffee shop or bar poaching some wifi, or at a remote field site or research vessel – we are very excited to welcome you to the third ever World Seabird Conference. 

We would like to thank ALL of you for being so patient as WSC3 was scheduled, postponed, rescheduled, revised to virtual, and scheduled again. Throughout all those iterations there was one message that remained perfectly clear – seabirders were eager to meet and share their science. If we could not meet in person then virtual it would have to be, but a 3rd WSC was something everyone wanted. That support and commitment helped the WSU Board of Directors and Member Societies sort through all of the challenges they faced to plan and hold this conference. 

The list of those that need to be thanked is long and, while we plan on recognizing many during the live closing plenary, it is important to do so here in writing as well. 

The Australasian Seabird Group was our Local Host for our plan to meet in Hobart, Tasmania. They invested substantial time and effort to find venues and plan events that we unfortunately were not able to visit. Nonetheless we appreciate their work on behalf of WSC3 and encourage all of you to thank them when you see their members in Gathertown or elsewhere during our virtual meeting. Their willingness to host created the initial excitement for WSC3 and without that our vWSC would not have been possible.

We also wish to thank the Science Program Committee, the Virtual Committee, and the Early Career Scientist Committee for their hard work planning the logistics, events, and schedule for vWSC3. These committees also had to deal with changing parameters and short timelines that made what is always a challenging task even more challenging. The Travel Awards Committee also invested time and effort in developing procedures for awarding travel funds that ultimately would not be implemented. 

Our ability to shift from an in-person to a virtual meeting, and to do so in a way that would be financially feasible, was due to the effective efforts of The International Fundraising Committee and to our financial sponsors. The IFC raised funds to support WSC3 and then, through the good relationships they built with sponsors, ensured we could re-envision how those funds could be used to support a virtual conference that would be affordable and high-quality.

We all owe the WSU Board of Directors and the Representatives of the Member Societies a great deal of thanks. They are the ones who manage the WSU and, for the past 18 months, have had to have a series of challenging meetings and conversations, have had to make a series of difficult choices, have had to do all of that while considering the short- and long-term health of WSU and the World Seabird Conferences, and did this while also managing their own challenges at their day jobs. We are grateful for their diligence, patience, foresight, and throughout all of the meetings, their collegiality. Also – a 6-year term is quite a commitment!

There would not be a WSC3 without a successful WSC1 and WSC2. Thanks go to the Pacific Seabird Group for their support of WSC1 in Victoria, Canada, and to the African Seabird Group for their support of WSC2 in Cape Town, South Africa. In each of these endeavors and for our current conference we were fortunate to work with a dependable and trustworthy partner in Podium Conferences. Michelle Smith and Marischal de Armond have become valued members of our team and have not only helped us plan conferences but have assisted and advised the WSU Chairs and Board on issues above and beyond conference planning. 

As we embark on our vWSC3 week we extend to all of you our thanks for showing up, for being patient, and most importantly for the work you do with seabirds. We are all part of a unique, global community that shares an interest, a fascination, and a passion for birds that make a living in our world’s oceans. We have advanced the science, conservation, and management of seabirds as well the ecosystems they inhabit. We are consistently impressed and motivated by the work you do. 

The WSU formed in 2010 because we saw the need for a global organization to address challenges at a global level. Over the past 11 years WSU has grown, adapted, and evolved to become the community that this week is making vWSC3 a reality. Enjoy the week, appreciate and support the friends and colleagues you have made in the community, and if you see us in a virtual hallway please stop and say hello! 

Thank you for the opportunity to serve all of you and the WSU over the past few years,

Nicholas Carlile, Interim Chair, WSU<br>
Patrick Jodice, 2nd Chair of the WSU<br><br>

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rCc-s9eu6og" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JOLEP6uTMuc" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>



3rd World Seabird Conference

Join us for four days of science, networking and virtual engagement with delegates from around the world!

poster

### Looking for Cogsci 2023? Please [click here](https://underline.io/events/405/reception) to switch to 2023 edition.


**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,**
![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/99984908caba5e6453e5fc5ba34f3507.jpg)

**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/464h1m3iU68" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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.

Inference-making is a complex mental process as it involves retrieving prior knowledge and active meaning-making, appropriate for exploring processing automaticity vs. difficulty in different languages. People are prone to falsely recognizing sentences that represent the inferences they made due to gist encoding. To examine whether this process differs for L1 and L2, we presented forty-eight Turkish-English bilingual participants in Turkish, English, and dual-language sentence groups that allowed them to configure objects mentally and draw spatial inferences. Inferred sentences were recognized significantly more than new sentences. We observed this in L1 and L2, but not the dual-language condition. Higher L2 proficiency and lower executive functioning abilities were related to higher false recognition. These results are aligned with the bilingual memory organization, suggesting L2 approaches L1 automaticity with increased proficiency. Lower EF participants might prefer less effortful strategies to process information, such as averaging, abstracting, inferring, and gist extracting.

Bilinguals Infer in L2 Similarly, but not in Dual-language

Non-native speakers have been found to be penalized for their accent and grammatical errors. However, little is known about whether and how accent and grammaticality interact to influence native listeners’ perception of non-native speech, and whether listeners’ personality plays a role in this. We examined these questions by relating the acceptability scores of 40 English speech stimuli rated by 60 British listeners (30 female; 30 unfamiliar with accented speech) to factors including speech accent (British vs. Polish), grammaticality (well-formed vs. error-filled) and listener personality. The results suggest that non-native accent “protects” the speaker from being penalized for grammatical errors unless the listener has a certain personality profile: compared to non-native accented speech, the acceptability ratings of native accented speech showed a larger decrease when grammatical errors were present, yet listeners who were more conscientious, extravert or agreeable tended to give lower acceptability ratings to non-native accented speech, regardless of grammaticality.

Native perception of non-native speech: Speaker accent mitigates penalization for language errors in non-native speech unless the listener is conscientious

Experimental pragmatics tells us that a metaphor conveys salient features of a vehicle and that highly typical features tend to be salient. But can highly atypical features also be salient? When asking if John is loyal and hearing “John is a fox”, will the hearer conclude that John is disloyal because loyalty is saliently atypical for a fox? This prediction follows from our RSA-based model of metaphor understanding which relies on gradient salience. Our behavioral experiments corroborate the model's predictions, providing evidence that high and low typicality are salient and result in high interpretation confidence and agreement, while average typicality is not salient and makes a metaphor confusing. Our model implements the idea that other features of a vehicle, along with possible alternative vehicles, influence metaphor interpretation. It produces a significantly better fit compared to an existing RSA model of metaphor understanding, supporting our predictions about the factors at play.

Pragmatics of Metaphor Revisited: Formalizing the Role of Typicality and Alternative Utterances in Metaphor Understanding

When asked to paraphrase semantically strained sentences (e.g., the lantern limped), participants alter word meanings to fit the context (e.g., the light flickered). Judges who were asked to classify these meaning extensions classified verb extensions as primarily metaphoric and noun extensions as primarily taxonomic or metonymic/associative (King & Gentner, 2019; in prep.). To determine whether these online patterns are reflected in established word senses, we sampled 120 nouns and 120 verbs from three different frequency bands (100 wpm, 10 wpm, and 1 wpm) and obtained metaphoricity ratings of every sense for each word (1015 senses total, Oxford Dictionary API). Verb senses were rated as significantly more metaphoric than noun senses overall. In addition, metaphoricity increased as sense frequency decreased, and this effect was stronger for verbs than for nouns. Verbs’ high propensity for metaphoric extension has implications for evolution of word meanings.

Verbs are More Metaphoric than Nouns: Evidence from the Lexicon

Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, English allows infinite free embedding of the prenominal genitive -s, whereas the postnominal genitive of is largely restricted to one level and to a limited set of items. Therefore, speakers need to learn from experience which specific structures allow free embedding and which do not. One effort to account for the underlying learning mechanism, the distributional learning proposal, suggests the recursion of a structure (e.g. X1’s- X2) is licensed if X1 position and X2 position are productively substitutable in the input. A series of corpus studies have confirmed the availability of such distributional cues in child directed speech. The present study further tests the distributional learning proposal with an artificial language learning experiment.

Distributional learning of recursive structures

This study examined relations between teacher-child closeness and conflict in preschool and children’s behavior problems, social skills, and executive function (EF) in kindergarten, and explored if these relations are moderated by parental education. The study also sought to examine the relation between teacher-child closeness and conflict and the subscales of children’s behavior problems and social skills. The sample consisted of 126 preschool children (M = 56.70 months, SD = 3.89). Regression analyses revealed that teacher-child conflict predicted children’s social skills, specifically assertion, engagement, and cooperation. Parental education moderated the association between teacher-child conflict and EF, and also emerged as a marginally significant moderator of teacher-child closeness and behavior problems. The findings thereby indicated differential relations between teacher-child closeness and conflict and children’s outcomes. With regard to future research, it may be important to consider other aspects of the teacher-child relationship and classroom environment as well.

The association between preschool teacher-child relationship and children’s kindergarten outcomes

On the road to a more fair and just world, we must recognize ubiquitous disparities in our society, but awareness alone is not enough: Observed disparities between groups often get wrongly attributed to inherent traits (e.g., African Americans are disproportionately arrested because they are more prone to crime), creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop. As shown in a past study (Meng & Xu, 2020), such reasoning can result from the Naive Utility Calculus (Jara-Ettinger et al., 2016): If an agent knows a target trait's "hit rate'' in every group and avoids unnecessary sampling, it is rational to infer that groups sampled from more often have higher hit rates. The previous study used non-social categories (robot chickens) as stimuli, which raises the question of whether the results generalize to the social domain. In the current study, we replicated past findings using novel social groups (aliens): Overall, people were more likely to check groups examined more often by the agent but when observed hit rates did not support the agent's sampling behavior, people incorporated both information sources to infer group hit rates. This work brought NUC-based models one step closer towards tackling disparities in the real world consisted of social groups.

Naive Utility Calculus underlies the reproduction of disparities in social groups

In two studies we show that a speaker’s choice to obey or violate the pragmatic maxims of Relevance and Informativeness – as well as the reasons behind these choices (Inability vs. Unwillingness) – affect how the speaker is socially perceived, revealing a connection between pragmatic reasoning and social evaluation. Our findings further suggest that core dimensions of social evaluation (Competence vs. Warmth) are differentially informed by different aspects of a speaker’s conversational behavior. We conclude that, even after a brief exposure to someone’s conversational behavior, people draw social inferences about the speaker by reasoning along the same principles that inform pragmatic inferences. Our results highlight how pragmatic reasoning, social evaluation and person perception jointly underlie the meaning conveyed by linguistic utterances in communication.

We Are What We Say: Pragmatic Violations Have Social Costs

Narratives (sequences of purposively related concrete situations) and arguments (reasoning and conclusions in an attempt to persuade) are distinct cornerstones of human discourse. While theories of their linguistic structures exist, it is unclear which theorized features influence perception of narrative and argument quality. Furthermore, differences in their usage over time and across formal versus informal mediums remain unexplored. Thus, we use an original dataset of news and Reddit discourse (consisted of >10,000 clauses), annotated for clause-level discourse elements (e.g., generic statements vs. events; Smith, 2003), and their coherence relations (e.g., cause/effect; Wolf & Gibson, 2005). We identify the features that correspond to differing perceptions of narrative and argument quality across multiple dimensions. Since the documents cover marijuana legalization discourse during a period of massive attitude shift in the U.S. (2008-2019), we also examine changes over time in discourse structure within this rapidly evolving sociopolitical context.

The Anatomy of Discourse: Linguistic Predictors of Narrative and Argument Quality

The physical properties of space may be universal, but the way people conceptualize space is not. In some groups, people tend to use egocentric space (e.g. left, right) to encode the locations of objects, while in other groups, people encode the same spatial scene using allocentric space (e.g. upriver, downriver). These different spatial Frames of Reference (FoRs) characterize the way people talk about spatial relations and the way they think about them, even when they are not using language. Although spatial language and spatial thinking tend to covary, the root causes of this variation are unclear. Here we propose that this variation in FoR use reflects the spatial discriminability of the relevant spatial continua. In an initial test of this proposal in a group of indigenous Bolivians, we compared FoR use across spatial axes that are known to differ in discriminability. In two non-verbal tests, participants spontaneously used different FoRs on different spatial axes: On the lateral axis, where egocentric (left-right) discrimination is difficult, their behavior was predominantly allocentric; on the sagittal axis, where egocentric (front-back) discrimination is relatively easy, their behavior was predominantly egocentric. These findings support the spatial discriminability hypothesis, which may explain variation in spatial concepts not only across axes, but also across groups, between individuals, and over development.

Downloads

Next from CogSci 2021

Bilinguals Infer in L2 Similarly, but not in Dual-language

Similar lecture

Genetic similarity, odor cues and microbiota in blue petrels and kittiwakes