United States

Observing gestures facilitate listeners’ comprehension, especially for visual-spatial information. However, people differ in how and to what extent they benefit from gestures depending on their visual-spatial abilities. This study examined whether and how spatial skills (i.e., mental rotation) relate to how much listeners benefit from observing gestures. We tested 51 Turkish-speaking adults’ comprehension of spatial relations when the critical spatial information was provided in three different conditions: (1) only in speech (e.g., saying “right” without making any gesture), (2) both in speech and in gesture (saying “right” and gesturing to the right), and (3) only in gesture (saying “here” and gesturing to the right). We found that mental rotation scores were associated with increased accuracy only for speech + gesture (z = 2.37, p = .02) and the gesture-only conditions (z = 2.13, p = .03). These results suggest that visual-spatial cognitive resources might be important for gesture processing.

CogSci 2021

Is it for all? Spatial abilities matter in processing gestures during the comprehension of spatial language

### 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,**
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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

Strategic decision-making is chiefly studied in behavioral economics using multi-agent games. Decades of empirical research has revealed that emotions play a crucial role in strategic decision-making, calling into question the “emotionless” homo economicus. In this work, we present a unified process-level account of a broad range of empirical findings on the effect of emotions in Prisoner’s Dilemma and Ultimatum games—the two most studied games in behavioral sciences. Under the empirically well-supported assumption that emotions modulate loss aversion, we show that Nobandegani et al.’s (2018) sample-based expected utility model can account for the effect of emotions on: (i) cooperation rate in Prisoner’s Dilemma, and (ii) the rejection rate of unfair offers in the Ultimatum game. We conclude by discussing the implications of our work for emotion research, and for developing a unified process-level account of the role of emotions in strategic decision-making.

Emotions in Games: Toward a Unified Process-Level Account

The Go/No-Go paradigm is being used in various clinical applications frequently. Besides, the sequential sampling models have achieved much attention for modeling the underlying processes of decision making. One of the most successful sequential sampling models that is used also for modeling the Go/No-Go paradigm is the drift diffusion model (DDM). The major assumption of the drift diffusion model is that the process of information accumulation is terminated by reaching the boundaries. But this assumption has been argued during the last years and some studies have confirmed that the accumulation process continues after making a decision (i.e. accumulator reaches the boundaries). The main constraint of the drift diffusion model for modeling the Go/No-Go paradigm is that it can not capture the ongoing information accumulation after making a decision. This is important in the Go/No-Go paradigm because when the participants decide to no-go they should wait until finishing the trial and it is a good time for continuing the information accumulation. In this paper, we are going to develop a variation of the drift diffusion model which is able to capture continuing the information accumulation after making a no-go decision. The developed model is based on substituting the lower boundary with a reflecting boundary. This paper aims to introduce an alternative model for Go/No-Go paradigm and after presenting a theoretical discussion on the model behavior, mean first passage time, and the first passage time distribution of the model, it is compared with the previous DDM model.

Reflected Boundary Drift Diffusion Model: A Double Responding Framework for Go/No-Go Paradigm

Finding adequate representations is an important challenge in solving complex problems. Especially in unfamiliar task domains, initially chosen representations might not cover all of its relevant aspects. I am presenting a theory of representational change based on results from a case study of dyadic problem solving using a spatial transformation task of gradually increasing complexity. This theory proposes that change is driven by expressive limitations of the representational substrates in question. Iconic representations, such as gestures are useful in representing simple objects, but full resemblance soon encounters limits. Metonymic gestures, iconically resembling parts of an object but referring to the whole can extend this scope. By omitting aspects of the problem domain, those partial resemblences can then feed into memory retrieval processes for metaphors bearing no actual similarity to domain objects but to, for instance, such metonymic gestures. Finally, elaborating on such metaphors can open up further representational possibilities.

On the Gradual Construction of Complex Abstract Representations in Spatial Problem Solving

Not every prosocial act is equally praiseworthy. As adults, we tend to evaluate helpers depending on others’ needs; helping someone with a hard task may be more burdensome but also more prosocial than helping someone with an easy task. Despite growing evidence that infants are sensitive to the costs of others’ actions, whether such representations inform their evaluation of prosocial acts remains an open question. Here, we ask whether 16-month-olds’ preference between two helpers is sensitive to task difficulty. Infants preferentially reached for (Exp. 1), and looked at (Exp. 2), an agent who helped someone facing a high-cost task over an agent who helped someone facing a low-cost task. Such preference disappeared when the agents completed the same tasks in a self-serving context. These results suggest that infants use action cost not only to predict and explain others’ behaviors but also to evaluate others in prosocial contexts.

Who Needs More Help? Sixteen-Month-Old Infants Prefer to Look at and Reach for Helpers who Help with Harder Tasks

Metacognitive control is the deliberate manipulation of cognitive states such as attentional control and emotional regulation (Flavell, 1979). Metacognitive control is known to improve with practice to become more skillful, yet the mechanisms for developing metacognitive skills remains unclear. I propose that metacognitive skills can be explained through the skills acquisition model advanced by Fitts and Posner (1967) and Anderson (1982). This account will focus on the process of proceduralization, where declarative task knowledge is converted into procedural knowledge. This model has been well researched in the development of both motor skills and cognitive skills (Ford et al., 2005; Anderson, 2007). To date, the model has not yet been robustly applied to the acquisition of metacognitive skills. As Anderson used an ACT-R model to frame his account of cognitive skills, I will apply an ACT-R model to account for the development of metacognitive skills.

The Proceduralization of Metacognitive Skills

Offloading cognition to external stores is practiced ubiquitously in daily life (e.g., counting on fingers, writing lists), yet is a relatively new area of investigation within cognitive science. Previous experiments have assessed the benefits and downfalls, including participants’ lowered memory for offloaded information that is no longer available (Gardony et al., 2013; Sparrow et al., 2011). In addition, when offloading, individuals appear susceptible to manipulations of their external store (Risko et al., 2019). We report a series of experiments investigating how the perceived reliability of an external store affects individuals’ susceptibility to manipulation of that store. Consistent with previous research, results suggest that the majority of participants do not notice an item inserted into their external store. However, once cued to this event, individuals do become more likely to subsequently notice a manipulation of their external store. Implications of this research for our understanding of distributed memory systems will be discussed.

The Perception of Reduced Reliability in an External Store Reduces Vulnerability to its Manipulation.

The present paper reports an experiment testing two views of how reasoners learn and generalize potentially complex causal knowledge. Previous work has focused on reasoners’ ability to learn integration functions that best describe how pre-defined candidate causes combine, potentially interactively, to produce an outcome in a domain. This empirical-function learning view predicts that participants would generalize an acquired integration function based on similarity to stimuli they experienced in the domain. An alternative causal-invariance view recognizes that one’s current representation may not yield invariant/useable causal knowledge –– knowledge that holds true when applied to new circumstances. This view incorporates useable causal knowledge as a goal and deviation from causal invariance as a criterion for knowledge revision. It predicts that participants would re-represent causes such that they do not interact with other causes, even when in participants’ experience all (pre-defined) causes in that domain interact. Our results favor the causal-invariance view.

When and Why Do Reasoners Generalize Causal Integration Functions? Causal Invariance as Generalizable Causal Knowledge

Emotional factors like valence, concreteness, and arousal have been shown to influence lexical processing, in that they exhibit non-neutrality, positivity, and negativity biases, respectively (e.g. Kuperman et al. 2014, J. Exp. Psych.; Pauligk et al. 2019, Scientific Reports). Since even weak cognitive biases can yield strong tendencies on a larger time scale, we investigate diachronic long-term effects of these factors on the reproductive success of English words. We operationalize reproductive success by means of diachronic growth, age-of-acquisition and prevalence of words. By combining emotional norms (Warriner et al. 2013, Beh. Res. Meth.; Kuperman et al. 2012, Beh. Res. Meth.) with historical language data (COHA; controlling for semantic shift), we show that long-term effects of valence and concreteness largely mimic cognitive short-term biases. However, arousal, quite surprisingly, exhibits a clearly positive effect on lexical reproduction. We attribute this reversed effect to (i) interactions among emotional factors and (ii) social effects.

Long-term effects of valence, concreteness, and arousal on lexical reproduction

Recently, the close connection between action and creativity has been gaining attention. However, studies investigating how the body influences creativity are limited. This study proposed the framework for that mechanism called Perception and Action-based Imagination based on studies of creativity and embodied cognition. It suggests that creation proceeds through the cycle of imagination generation based on perceptual information and the acquisition of rich perceptual information through imagination implementation. We conducted an experiment to investigate its validity. We prepared the following three conditions: the participants designed the toy with manipulation of the parts 1) by their bodies. 2) in their mind while seeing the parts. 3) in their mind without seeing the parts. Results showed that in the first condition, high creativity evaluations were obtained, the participants paid more attention to the possibility of part fabrication, and the above condition’s effect was partially explained by the focus of part fabrication.

Interaction between Action and Cognition in Creativity: Perception and Action-based Imagination (PAI) Framework

How do we know what others know? Prior work has focused on our early-emerging ability to infer the knowledge of single agents. Yet we often infer others’ knowledge by observing interactions between agents. In particular, the ability to reason about what communicators know can help children identify knowledgeable teachers. The present study investigates whether preschool-aged children infer what communicators know from how their communication influences listeners. Children observed two scenarios where a listener failed to activate a toy before succeeding. In the Effective-Communicator scenario, a speaker spoke nonsense language to a listener after they failed but before they succeeded. In the Ineffective- Communicator scenario, a speaker spoke to a listener before they initially failed. By around age 5, children preferred the one in the Effective- Communicator scenario when asked which speaker knows how the toy works. These results suggest young children can infer communicators’ knowledge solely from the presence of communication and its influence on others.

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Next from CogSci 2021

Emotions in Games: Toward a Unified Process-Level Account

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