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Performance on cognitive tasks is typically affected by many factors simultaneously. For example, performance on a retrieval practice task is determined not only by memory encoding and retrieval processes, but also by motor processes, executive functions, affective state, etc. Often, these contributing processes also vary over time. This makes it challenging to attribute performance changes to a single mechanism, especially in real-world settings.

Here we analyse performance data from multiple retrieval practice sessions completed by special forces trainees before and after a high-intensity speed march. Learning outcomes improved from session to session, which suggests increased memory function. However, a linear ballistic accumulator fitted to the data showed that changes in non-memory processes—a decrease in non-retrieval time in particular—sufficed to explain the observed improvements.

This work demonstrates that even with a simple task, assuming that performance changes are attributable to a single cognitive process can lead to erroneous conclusions.

CogSci 2021

Memory Performance in Special Forces: Speedier Responses Explain Improved Retrieval Performance after Physical Exertion

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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

Perceptual training leads to improvements in a wide range of simple visual tasks. However, it is still unclear how effective it can be for more difficult visual tasks in real-world domains such as radiology. Is it possible to train people to the level of experts? If so, what method is best, and how much training is necessary? Over four training sessions, we trained medically naive participants to identify the degree of fatty liver tissue present in ultrasound images. We found that both COMPARISON and SINGLE-CASE perceptual training techniques resulted in significant post-training improvement, but that the SINGLE-CASE training was more effective. Whilst people showed rapid learning with less than one hour of training, they did not improve to the level of experts, and additional training sessions did not provide significant benefits beyond the initial session. This suggests that perceptual training could usefully augment, but not replace, the traditional rule-based training that medical students currently receive.

How effective is perceptual training? Evaluating two perceptual training methods on a difficult visual categorisation task

The category variability effect is referred to as that the middle item between two categories is more similar to the low-variability category but tends to be classified as the high-variability category, which challenges the exemplar model. We however hypothesized that this effect can result from the use of the single-category strategy in a binary categorization task, specifically when only the low-variability category is referenced for categorization. One experiment was conducted with a recognition task inserted in the categorization task to selectively deepen the processing for the exemplars of the high-variability category, low-variability category, or both categories. The results showed that the strongest category variability effect occurred when the low-variability category was emphasized in the recognition task. The exemplar model SD-GCM provided a good account for the category variability effect, with a large weight for the low-variability category and a small weight for the high-variability category, hence verifying our hypothesis.

Exemplar Account for Category Variability Effect: Single Category based Categorization

Narratives can communicate moral character by describing one's past actions and motivations. When telling moral narratives, people might twist the truth to appear better than they are, while concealing this goal. We show that audiences evaluate a narrator’s moral character by inferring weights on three goals: providing accurate information, appearing morally good, and projecting an image of informativeness. Participants judged how narrators explained their choice during a “claim” task. Narrators could claim a raise at the risk of causing a co-worker to lose money. They could then lie or tell the truth and be direct or indirect about their motivations (e.g., “I’m not selfish” vs. “It was better for the co-worker”). Our results suggest that to be perceived as morally good, narrators must find a balance: trying too hard to appear generous is costly. We introduce a model for how narratives are constructed through recursive inference of audience perception.

Competing goals in the construction and perception of moral narratives

Understanding how people mentally represent expenditures is crucial to understanding how they manage their money. In this paper, we report three studies that investigate people’s representation of budgeting categories by asking people to categorize common expenditures of money (e.g., rent, dining out, etc.). We then examine the implications of these taxonomic representations of expenditures for how people selectively restrict their uses of money (e.g., when overspending on one item, for which other items would people choose to spend less). We found that there is consensus in people’s representations of expenditures, and that both the category membership and taxonomic distance between items predict how people restrict their spending.

Mental Representation of Budgeting Categories

COVID-19 and the 2021 U.S. Capitol attacks have highlighted the potential dangers of pseudoscientific and conspiratorial belief adoption. Approaches to combating misinformed beliefs have tried to "pre-bunk" or "inoculate" people against misinformation adoption and have yielded only modest results. These approaches presume that some citizens may be more gullible than others and thus susceptible to multiple misinformed beliefs. We provide evidence of an alternative account: it's simply too hard for all people to be accurate in all domains of belief, but most individuals are trying. We collected data on a constellation of human beliefs across domains from more than 1,700 people on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and find misinformed beliefs to be broadly, but thinly, spread among the population. Further, we do not find that individuals who adopt one misinformed belief are more likely to engage in pseudoscientific or conspiratorial thinking across the board, in opposition to "slippery slope” notions of misinformation adoption.

"Fringe" beliefs aren't fringe

Language emergence is characterized by a high degree of lexical variation. It has been suggested that the speed at which lexical conventionalization occurs depends partially on social structure. In large communities, individuals receive input from many sources, creating a pressure for lexical convergence. In small, insular communities, individuals can remember idiolects and share common ground with interlocuters, allowing these communities to retain a high degree of lexical variation. We look at lexical variation in Kata Kolok, a sign language which emerged six generations ago in a Balinese village, where women tend to have more tightly-knit social networks than men. We test if there are differing degrees of lexical uniformity between women and men by reanalyzing a picture description task in Kata Kolok. We find that women’s productions exhibit less lexical uniformity than men’s. One possible explanation of this finding is that women's more tightly-knit social networks allow for remembering idiolects, alleviating the pressure for lexical convergence, but social network data from the Kata Kolok community is needed to support this explanation.

Social structure and lexical uniformity: a case study of gender differences in the Kata Kolok community

The Fourth Industrial Revolution’s technological innovations are driving demand for high skill jobs in a global Knowledge Economy, precipitating Learning Scientists to advocate for developing Deeper Conceptual Understanding of STEM domains. In this study, Concreteness Fading is employed to develop Deeper Conceptual Understanding of Deductive Proof in geometry: enactive stage grounds justifications in spatial relationships through manipulating object-shapes; iconic stage grounds justifications in perceptual relationships through drawing images of object-shapes; symbolic stage grounds justifications in rule-based relationships through writing numbers in formulas about object-shapes. Think-aloud protocols were analyzed of post-secondary non-math majors (N = 8, male = 2, female = 6) randomly assigned to four conditions: enactive-iconic-symbolic (n = 2), enactive-symbolic (n = 2), iconic-symbolic (n = 2), symbolic (n = 2). Findings reveal reliance on affordances of spatial-based and perceptual-based proofs by participants after reaching a perceived impasse – demonstrating fascinating cognitive flexibility crucial for 21st century problem solving.

Affordances and Grounding Within Concreteness Fading When Learning Proof in STEM's Geometry

How do people acquire information and make decisions in an inherently complex world? We use the game Entropy Mastermind to investigate the cognitive strategies people adopt under various task conditions in situations characterized by high combinatorial complexity. N = 42 participants completed a total of 271 games, varying in incentive structure: In the speed condition, participants were incentivised for solving games quickly; in the efficiency condition, incentives were given for solutions requiring few problem solving steps; in the mixed condition, both speed and efficiency were incentivised.
We found that participants adapted their problem solving strategies to the imposed constraints: In the speed condition simpler strategies were used, making feedback easy to interpret. Our results support the hypothesis that in complex environments people flexibly adjust their cognitive strategies to optimize the fit between situational requirements and their cognitive resources.

Fast or efficient? Strategy selection in the game Entropy Mastermind

In addition to saliency and goal-based factors, a scene’s semantic content has been shown to guide attention in visual search tasks. Here, we ask if this rapidly available guidance signal can be leveraged to learn new attentional strategies. In a variant of the scene preview paradigm (Castelhano & Heaven, 2010), participants searched for targets embedded in real-world scenes with target locations linked to scene gist. We found that activating gist with scene previews significantly increased search efficiency over time in a manner consistent with formal theories of skill acquisition. We combine VGG16 and EBRW to provide a biologically inspired account of the gist preview advantage and its effects on learning in gist-guided attention. Preliminary model results suggest that, when preview information is useful, stimulus features may amplify the similarities and differences between exemplars.

Leveraging rapid scene perception in attentional learning

Certain colors are strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g. red is hot, blue is cold). Some of these associations are grounded in visual experiences like seeing hot embers glow red. Surprisingly, many congenitally blind people show similar color associations, despite lacking all visual experience of color. Presumably, they learn these associations via language. Can we detect these associations in the statistics of language? And if so, what form do they take? We apply a projection method to word embeddings trained on corpora of spoken and written text to identify color-adjective associations as they are represented in language. We show that these projections are predictive of color-adjective ratings collected from blind and sighted people, and that the effect size depends on the training corpus. Finally, we examine how color-adjective associations might be represented in language by training word embeddings on corpora from which various sources of color-semantic information are removed.

Memory Performance in Special Forces: Speedier Responses Explain Improved Retrieval Performance after Physical Exertion

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How effective is perceptual training? Evaluating two perceptual training methods on a difficult visual categorisation task

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