United States

Relational reasoning is an important component of abstract thought that emerges early in development but shows substantial variation across contexts, with children in the US and China following distinct developmental trajectories in one paradigm between 18m and 4y. To understand the mechanisms through which variation in the learning environment influences the development of relational reasoning, we examine early relational reasoning in Punjabi speakers in India, who share some cultural and linguistic elements of their experience with children in both the US and China. In a causal relational match-to-sample task, we find that 3-year-olds in India exhibit performance that is intermediate to their high-performing peers in China and the relatively poor performance observed in the US at this age. These results suggest complexity and variability in the development of relational reasoning and lay a foundation for future research designed to tease apart the factors associated with early diversity in relational reasoning.

CogSci 2021

Characterizing the development of relational reasoning in India

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

Join us!

<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
<br><br>

#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/tzgk/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>
<br>

CogSci 2023

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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.

Recent studies provide experimental evidence for joint rushing - the phenomenon that participants in rhythmic group activities unintentionally increase their tempo. 
We hypothesized that joint rushing arises from the combined workings of established sensorimotor synchronization mechanisms (e.g., phase and period correction) with a simple phase advance mechanism that has been studied in mass-synchronizing insects. 
We invited musicians and non-musicians to participate in three tapping experiments. Participants were asked to continue to produce a constant target tempo alone (solo) or together with a partner (joint). 
The results show that joint rushing induces a lasting period correction but stops when auditory feedback of the partner’s taps is removed. Musical training reduced the magnitude of joint rushing but did not eliminate it.
These results are consistent with our hypothesis that joint rushing occurs because adjustments induced by a simple phase advance mechanism alter the period of internal timekeeping.

The role of period correction and continuous input from a co-performer in joint rushing

Preschool children vary in their numerical knowledge, and this variation predicts math achievement throughout elementary school. Can preschool interventions that exercise school-relevant numerical concepts support later school math learning, and if so, what numerical activities should be targeted to best foster this learning? Here we ask whether a game-based intervention targeting preschool children’s understanding of the base-10 compositional system of number words and symbols improves their school-relevant numerical concepts in the short term. Five- to six-year-old children who played a numerical board game at home with their parents for two-three weeks showed improved preschool numerical concepts, compared to children who played a game with similar materials and procedures but no numerical content. This finding takes a first step toward developing and evaluating a suite of game-based interventions, leveraging research in developmental cognitive science both to enhance children’s learning in school and to deepen understanding of how children learn.

Enhancing Preschool Readiness: Evidence from a Home-based Game to Improve 5-year-old Children’s Mastery of Symbolic Numbers and Concepts

The aim of this study was to identify the effects of perceptual (visual and olfactory) and emotional imageries of food names to word recognition memories. First, we asked Japanese healthy participants to imagine visual (Experiment 1), olfactory (Experiment 2), emotional (Experiment 3), or preferential features (Experiment 4) of presented words associated with foods and drinks (imagining condition), while we also asked them to passively read presented words (reading condition). Second, they judged whether each word was previously presented (word recognition memory task). Results showed that accuracy rates of the imagining condition were significantly higher than those of the reading condition in word recognition memory tasks of all the experiments. Our findings suggest that perceptual and emotional imageries of food names facilitate word recognition memories.

Effects of perceptual and emotional imageries of food names to word recognition memories: four behavioral experiments

Interrupted time series analysis (ITSA) is a statistical procedure that evaluates whether an intervention causes a change in the intercept and/or slope of the time series. However, very little research has accessed causal learning in interrupted time series situations. We systematically investigated whether people are able to learn causal influences from a process akin to ITSA, and compared four different presentation formats of stimuli. We found that participants' judgments agreed with ITSA in cases in which the pre-intervention slope is zero or in the same direction as the changes in intercept or slope. However, participants had considerable difficulty controlling for pre-intervention slope when it is in the opposite direction of the changes in intercept or slope. The presentation formats didn't affect judgments in most cases, but did in one. We discuss these results in terms of two potential heuristics that people might use aside from a process akin to ITSA.

Causal Learning With Interrupted Time Series

Human learning efficiency in reinforcement learning tasks decreases when the number of the presented stimuli increases, a finding known as the "set size effect". From the computational rationality perspective, this effect can be interpreted as the brain’s balancing task performance against rising cognitive costs. Still, it remains unclear how best to quantify cognitive cost in learning tasks. One candidate is policy complexity, defined in terms of information theory as the mutual information between the sensory input and behavioral response. However, using a published data set (Collins & Frank, 2012), we show that policy complexity alone cannot explain the set size effect because the optimal policy complexity does not necessarily increase with the set size. We therefore propose a computational model and conduct a model-based analysis to show the minimal constituents of cognitive cost are policy complexity and representation complexity---the information quantity conveyed from sensory inputs to internal representations.

A computationally rational model of human reinforcment learning

In choice blindness (CB) experiments participants often accept a manipulated outcome as their actual choice. In a typical CB experiment the manual actions that participants perform are always correct (pointing, writing, etc.), while the outcome is mismatched. However, what would happen if an error was induced at the motor level, but the outcome nevertheless remained correct? We investigated this by having participants drag a mouse cursor across the screen to the face they found the most attractive, while we manipulated either the outcome (classic CB), or the cursor (forced motor deviation), or sometimes both. Interestingly, what we found was that when the cursor was manipulated but not the outcome, the motor ‘wrongness’ would override the goal ‘rightness’, and participants ended up rejecting the outcome they actually wanted. We will discuss the implications of this new reverse choice blindness effect for theories of self-monitoring, agency and preference change.

If you think your action was erroneous, you will reject the outcome you actually wanted: a case of reverse choice blindness

To what extent do human reward learning and decision-making rely on the ability to represent and generate richly structured relationships between options? We provide evidence that structure learning and the principle of compositionality play crucial roles in human reinforcement learning. In a new multi-armed bandit paradigm, we found evidence that participants are able to learn representations of different reward structures and combine them to make correct generalizations about options in novel contexts. Moreover, we found substantial evidence that participants transferred knowledge of simpler reward structures to make compositional generalizations about rewards in complex contexts. This allowed participants to accumulate more rewards earlier, and to explore less whenever such knowledge transfer was possible. We also provide a computational model which is able to generalize and compose knowledge for complex reward structures. This model describes participant behaviour in the compositional generalization task better than various other models of decision-making and transfer learning.

Compositional generalization in multi-armed bandits

Hindsight bias is exhibited when knowledge of an outcome (i.e., an anchor) affects subsequent recollections of previous predictions (i.e., an estimate). Hindsight bias usually leads to estimates being remembered as closer to the anchor than they actually were. The exact amount of hindsight bias exhibited depends on the anchor value and the anchor plausibility, with experimental results showing that hindsight bias is elicited only when the anchor is perceived to be plausible. In this paper we present a Bayesian model that captures the relationship between hindsight bias and anchor plausibility. This model provides a rational account of hindsight bias by considering memory recall as a statistical problem, where the goal is to reconstruct the original estimate using the anchor as new evidence. Simulations show that the modeled trends align closely with previously published human data.

A Rational Account of Anchor Effects in Hindsight Bias

Though humans should defer to the superior judgement of AI in an increasing number of domains, certain biases prevent us from doing so. Understanding when and how these biases occur is a central challenge for human-computer interaction. A proposed source of such bias is the perceived subjectivity of tasks. We tested this hypothesis using one of the most subjective tasks possible: Evaluating joke funniness. Across two experiments, we addressed the following: Would people rate jokes as less funny if they believed an AI created them? When asked to rate jokes and guess their likeliest source, participants evaluated jokes attributed to humans as the funniest and those to AI as the least funny. However, when we explicitly framed these same jokes as either human or AI-created, there was no difference in performance-level ratings. These results challenge the notion that task subjectivity always biases users against AI if the source is transparent.

The Funny Thing About Algorithm Aversion: Investigating Bias Toward AI Humor

We explore the link between children’s gesture production and analogical reasoning. Specifically, we ask whether children who spontaneously gesture when completing a retelling task are more likely to engage in analogical transfer, compared to those who do not gesture. To test this, 85 5-7-year-olds listened to three superficially distinct stories that shared a common abstract problem and solution. After each of the first two exemplar stories, participants were asked to retell the story events to a naïve listener and their speech and spontaneous gesture(s) were coded. For the third story, participants were asked to generate the analogous solution themselves. Results indicate a significant relationship between children’s analogical transfer and gesture production. This preliminary study suggests that children’s spontaneous gestures may provide a window into their analogical processing. We discuss future directions aimed at further examining the mechanism underlying this relationship.

Downloads

Next from CogSci 2021

The role of period correction and continuous input from a co-performer in joint rushing

Similar lecture

Relational abstraction in early childhood: Three cultures and three trajectories