United States

Near-misses sting: As adults, we intuitively understand that someone who just missed a desirable outcome (near-miss) feels worse than someone who missed by a far margin (far-miss). What cognitive capacities support these intuitions, and how do they emerge in early childhood? We presented adults (n=42) and six- to eight-year-olds (n=91; pre-registered) with various near-miss scenarios. We found that (1) adults generally infer that a near-miss character would feel worse than a far-miss character, (2) yet their inferences vary depending on the context, and (3) children show a strikingly different pattern from adults, robustly choosing the far-miss character as feeling worse. The tendency to judge the near-miss character as feeling worse increased with age, but even 8-year-olds were still below chance. These patterns raise the possibility that young children start with a distance-based bias that gradually gets replaced by adult-like inferences that involve counterfactual reasoning.

CogSci 2021

&quot;If only Santa had one more present&quot;: Exploring the development of near-miss counterfactual reasoning

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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.

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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.

"If only Santa had one more present": Exploring the development of near-miss counterfactual reasoning

poster

Despite the increase in studies investigating people’s explana- tory preferences in the domains of psychology and philoso- phy, little is known about their preferences in more applied do- mains, such as the criminal justice system. We show that when people evaluate competing legal accounts of the same evidence that vary in complexity, their explanatory preferences are af- fected by: i) whether they are required to draw causal mod- els of the evidence, and ii) the actual structure that is drawn. Although previous research has shown that people can reason correctly about causality, ours is one of the first studies that shows that generating and drawing causal models directly af- fects people’s evaluations of explanations.

The role of causal models in evaluating simple and complex legal explanations

This paper examines whether advanced law students are resistant to the blame blocking effect—a tendency to assign higher punishments for failed attempts than failed attempts with independent causal chains leading to intended harm (Cushman, 2008). This effect goes against the criminal law principle that intentionally acting towards committing a crime, and not accidental outcomes, determine liability for attempts. To further investigate whether advanced students of law are judging blame blocking scenarios correctly (in line with their legal expertise), in two experiments, we compared their punishment responses with four populations: beginning law students, advanced philosophy students, advanced natural science students, and laypeople with no academic background. We did not observe the blame blocking effect in either of the four student populations, and it was only partially present in the lay population. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on legal expertise and the blame blocking effect in general.

Blame Blocking and Expertise Effects Revisited

The question of whether bilingual language experience confers a cognitive advantage remains open. Controversy arises from assertions that putative advantages can instead be explained by differences in culture, socioeconomic class, or immigration status, as well as the classification of bilingual experience as a fixed variable rather than a random effect. The present study addresses these issues by assessing the impact of variability in English (L2) language experience on executive function in a group of Mandarin-English speakers (n = 41) from Shenzhen. Participants reported on demographic details, language history, perceived stress, and performed a Simon task online. Data were analysed using Linear Mixed Effects (LME) models to test for individual differences on Simon task performance. Results showed higher levels of L2 proficiency were associated with reduced Simon effects, suggesting a cognitive advantage.

Internet-based Assessment of an Inhibitory Control Advantage in Bilingual Chinese High School Students

Children and adults show preferences for native speakers and judge them to be more credible sources of information than non-native speakers. Previous research with children has attributed this bias to a preference for in-group members. The present study investigated the role of processing fluency on children’s social judgements. Children were shown two speakers (one with a native accent and the other with a non-native accent) relaying a message from another individual. They were then asked to make credibility and social judgements about the speakers and their messages. Children were also asked a processing fluency question, and a question about the speakers’ comprehension of the original message. Responses to the processing fluency question and question about the speakers’ comprehension predicted credibility judgements, but did not predict preference. These findings suggest that processing fluency may play a role in developing biases towards non-native accented speakers. Implications are discussed.

Broken Telephone: Children's Judgments of Messages Delivered by Non-Native Speakers are Influenced by Processing Fluency

In three experiments (total N = 1302) we investigated whether causal proximity affects moral judgments. We manipulated causal proximity by varying the length of chains mediating between actions and outcomes, and by varying the strengths of causal links. We demonstrate that moral judgments are affected by causal proximity with longer chains or weaker links leading to more lenient moral evaluations. Moreover, we identify outcome foreseeability as the crucial factor linking causal proximity and moral judgments. While effects of causal proximity on moral judgments were small when controlling for factors that were confounded in previous studies, knowledge about the presence of causal links substantially alters judgments of permissibility and responsibility. The experiments demonstrate a tight coupling between causal representations, inferences about mental states, and moral reasoning.

A Causal Proximity Effect in Moral Judgment

People sometimes criticize others for feeling sad, especially when they judge that person's sadness to be irrational. According to canonical models of blame, these reactions reflect attributions of control over the negative emotion. However, some scholars have recently suggested that blame reactions towards other's emotions ignore attributions of control, and instead, reflect negative reactions to the emotion itself. We present a study that adjudicates between these two competing views. Our results support control-based models of blame and criticism. We also identify two cues that people rely on when attributing control over emotions; namely, how well calibrated the emotion is to its eliciting circumstances and the sufferer’s capacity to think rationally. In sum: People will criticize others for their emotional suffering when they judge both that the suffering is irrational, and that the sufferer is sufficiently rational to recognize this fact, and so can choose to stop feeling upset.

Why do people criticize others for suffering irrationally?

Research on contrastive category learning has revealed a robust tendency for learners to develop caricaturized representations (elsewhere: ideals or extreme points) to support successful discriminative classification. These representations are defined by extreme values on some task-relevant dimension and are often indicated as highly representative of their categories. Work in this area has elaborated the task constraints and contexts necessary for these representations to emerge, but little research has scrutinized whether caricatured representations extend beyond a category’s known range of feature values. To these ends, across two experiments, we investigated whether the most representative items for a category can extend beyond the training set. Data from pairwise typicality comparisons following learning suggests that caricatured categories may be supported by representations that extend past the feature range present in training. The findings are better explained by certain representational frameworks (e.g., adaptive reference points, boundaries) than others (e.g., exemplars, clusters).

Extrapolation Under Caricatured Representations

Modus tollens is a rule of inference in classical, two-valued logic which allows to derive the negation of the antecedent from a conditional and the negation of its consequent. In this paper, we investigate when humans draw such conclusions and what modulates the application of modus tollens. We consider conditionals which may or may not be obligations and which may or may not have necessary antecedents. We show that humans make significantly more modus tollens inferences in case of obligation conditionals and that the time to make a modus tollens inference is shorter than the time to answer ``nothing follows''. We illustrate how these differences can be modeled within the weak completion semantics.

When are Humans Reasoning with Modus Tollens?

Text skimming is a common reading behavior that occurs when readers scan text at a faster than normal rate to attempt to form understanding when not able to read at normal speed. Research has suggested that reading time varies across a skimmed text, guided by attention and comprehension goals. However, do individual differences in the ability to manage attention affect skimming? Are those better at managing attention (i.e., high working memory) also better at managing text skimming? Two experiments were conducted where participants who varied in WMC were asked to skim an unfamiliar expository text, both on a computer, and while being eyetracked. In both experiments, while participants did spend more time reading earlier portions of the text, this did interact with WMC. Those higher in WMC balanced their reading efforts more equally across the entire text, suggesting that text skimming behavior is sensitive to differences in WMC.

Readers text skimming behavior changes with variation in working memory capacity

What can stories teach us about the real world? How can stories change our behavior? From research on cognitive maps, we know that hippocampal neurons form maps of physical space and time. Here, we propose that the same neural processes underlie engagement with fictional stories: during story processing we create cognitive maps of various domains—spatial, social, moral, etc.—that we can later use for real-world navigation. This perspective can also inspire new methodological tools for assessing story processing, and we give an example showing how a story can be modeled as paths taken on a cognitive map. In summary, we see stories as affording paths that guide our navigation through multiple dimensions of life, which raises the implication that the function of stories, including their moral content, is not only to be understood at the level of abstract and linguistically coherent propositions, but at the fundamental level of navigation.

"If only Santa had one more present": Exploring the development of near-miss counterfactual reasoning

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The role of causal models in evaluating simple and complex legal explanations

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