United States

Among primates, humans are special in their ability to create and manipulate highly elaborate structures of language, mathematics or music. We show that this sensitivity is present in a much simpler domain: the visual perception of geometric shapes. We asked human subjects to detect an intruder shape among six quadrilaterals. Although the intruder was defined by an identical amount of displacement of a single vertex, the results revealed a geometric regularity effect: detection was considerably easier with most regular shapes. This effect was replicated in several tasks and in both uneducated adults and preschoolers. Baboons, however, showed no such geometric regularity effect even after extensive training. Baboon behavior was captured by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but a symbolic model was needed to fit human behavior. Our results indicate that the human propensity for symbolic abstraction permeates even elementary shape perception and they suggest a new putative signature of human singularity.

CogSci 2021

Sensitivity to geometric shape regularity in humans and baboons: A putative signature of human singularity

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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#### About

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.

#### Our History 

* **Society Creation**<br>
The Society was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts in 1979. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. 
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* **Conference Creation**<br>
The first conference on cognitive science was held at La Jolla, California in August, 1979, and has occurred annually since then. The proceedings of each conference are published, and those from most years are available through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The annual proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference represent a major source of information on new work and new ideas in the scientific study of thinking. In 1990, the Society, with help from an anonymous donor, established the David Marr Prize for the best student paper at each annual meeting.
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* **Journal Creation**<br>
The Journal, Cognitive Science, began publication in 1976, and is now published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Executive Editor is currently Richard P. Cooper of Birkbeck, University of London, and there are 18 Associate Editors and a 30-member editorial board. It serves as the premier outlet for research reports that intersect two or more disciplines. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society. The Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society voted in late 2006 to found a new journal, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). The Editor in Chief is Wayne Gray, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The journal seeks to fill a niche not occupied by Cognitive Science Journal or other cognitive science journals. Membership in the Society includes a subscription to Cognitive Science and TopiCS. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society.
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#### Code of Conduct

By attending the CogSci 2025 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s **[Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ChPuihLy6jE_BWqfO7J2KKgX35JW2zsM/view?usp=sharing)**.
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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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### 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.

This paper explores previous arguments that language 
evolved not from animal communication, as naturally 
assumed by most scholars, but instead out of animal 
cognition. It is proposed here that additional support for this 
argument comes from Cognitive Linguistics, an
interdisciplinary branch of linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics
mediates communication and cognition but, as with Cognitive 
Discourse Analysis, studies language use in terms of what it 
demonstrates about underlying cognitive processes and 
concepts. The paper demonstrates key examples of animal 
cognition’s links to language, with Cognitive Linguistics 
support, as well as the approach’s application to animal 
cognition in terms of domain-general symbolism, beyond 
verbal language. However, because communication remains a 
major function of language, the communicative aspect ought 
to be maintained in the explanation of language evolution.

Cognitive Linguistics Support for the Evolution of Language from Animal Cognition

Effective social co-ordination benefits from mentally representing a partner’s actions. Chimpanzees can successfully work together, but the cognitive mechanisms they employ to aid social co-ordination remain unclear. Studies of action planning show that, like humans, chimpanzees demonstrate the end-state-comfort effect; considering the end of an action sequence during motor-planning, e.g. using an initially awkward grasp when handling an overturned glass to facilitate how it will end up being held. Human research shows that we extend this to a partner; we pass objects in a way that facilitates the action to be performed with them. Here, we assessed the location in which chimpanzees passed a tool to an experimenter to investigate action accommodation. We manipulated experimenter hand location and their ease of access to locations and found some effect on passing behaviour indicating that, under certain conditions, chimpanzees consider a partner’s actions when planning their own actions in a co-ordination context.

Do chimpanzees represent the actions of a co-ordination partner?

It has long been debated whether aesthetics is something uniquely human. Our ongoing project aims to empirically address comparative aesthetics in a collaboration between psychologists and biologists. Defining aesthetic responses as approach behaviour associated with sensory pleasure and corresponding physiological states, we are exploring whether humans and non-human animals share similar mechanisms in their evaluation of sexually attractive stimuli. Specifically, we compare humans and ring doves (Streptopelia risoria), a species whose courtship behaviour and physiology have been extensively investigated in behavioural and neuroendocrinology research. Both species form pair bonds, communicate using visual and auditory signals, and can be tested in laboratory conditions with conspecifics or using video and auditory stimuli. Truly comparative work involves using as similar an experimental approach as possible for both human and animal participants. Here we report our comparative methods and experimental paradigms, and some recent results.

Comparative Aesthetics: A novel approach to investigate multimodal attractiveness in humans and animals

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, capacities, or mental states to non-human animals. Numerous factors likely affect our tendency to anthropomorphise (TA). Previous studies, using questionnaire methods found increased TA with phylogenetic distance to other species, while empathy and compassion decreased. We used covert focal observations, typically used to quantify animal behavior, to collect visitor comments at primate enclosures in two European Zoos (Vienna, Nuremberg). We quantified TA as the relative frequency of anthropomorphic vs. non-anthropomorphic comments. We additionally collected questionnaire data to investigate how average perceived resemblance to humans and species aesthetic appeal mediate the relatedness effect on TA. Following our hypotheses, we expect TA to correlate negatively with phylogenetic distance, and positively with increased resemblance and aesthetic perception independently of phylogenetic distance. Using a novel approach, this study provides new insights into human perception of and emotional connection to non-human primates.

Primates watching primates watching primates: Why do we anthropomorphise?

Dogs are not particularly known for complex physical cognitive abilities. However, a number of recent violation-of-expectation studies have challenged this view. In the current eye-tracking study, we further investigated dogs’ (N=15) reaction to physically implausible events, particularly in the context of support, occlusion, and launching events. In Experiment 1, the dogs watched a rolling ball moving over a gap in a surface either falling down or hovering over the gap. In Experiment 2, the dogs saw a ball rolling behind a narrow pole either disappearing behind it or re-appearing on the other side. In Experiment 3, the dogs observed launching events either with or without contact between the balls. The dogs’ pupil dilation response and looking times suggest that they form implicit expectations about occlusion and launching events but not about gravity-related events at least in the context of animated objects on a screen.

Expectancy violations about physical properties of animated objects in dogs

The flexible control of sequential behavior is a fundamental aspect of speech, enabling endless reordering of a limited set of learned vocal elements (syllables or words). Songbirds are phylogenetically distant from humans but share both the capacity for vocal learning and neural circuitry for vocal control that includes direct pallial-brainstem projections. Based on these similarities, we hypothesized that songbirds might likewise be able to learn flexible, moment-by-moment control over vocalizations. Here, we demonstrate that Bengalese finches (Lonchura striata domestica), which sing variable syllable sequences, can learn to rapidly modify the probability of specific sequences (e.g. ‘ab-c’ versus ‘ab-d’) in response to arbitrary visual cues. Moreover, once learned, this modulation of sequencing occurs immediately following changes in contextual cues and persists without external reinforcement. Our findings reveal a capacity in songbirds for learned contextual control over syllable sequencing that parallels human cognitive control over syllable sequencing in speech.

Songbirds can learn flexible contextual control over syllable sequencing

Multimodal signals consist of multiple components in multiple sensory channels and are common in animal courtship. Signal components can carry unique or redundant information about the courting animal. The response to such multimodal displays might additionally reveal multisensory integration such that the response to the whole display is not simply the sum of the responses to the individual parts. In this study, we used high-quality audiovisual recordings of courting male ring doves and measured female behavioural responses to video playback. 21 females were split into three conditions: one featured multimodal, audiovisual playback, while in the other two, either the visual or auditory courtship component was occluded using familiar stimuli (foliage; vacuum cleaner sound). We analysed female behaviours associated with sexual stimulation and compared frequency of behaviours across conditions and between playback and control intervals. Additionally, we measured blood levels of oestradiol before and after testing.

Using playback to investigate multimodal signalling of attractiveness in ring doves (Streptopelia risoria)

People ask questions that are far richer, more informative, and more creative than current AI systems. We propose a neuro-symbolic framework for modeling human question asking, which represents questions as formal programs and generates programs with an encoder-decoder based deep neural network. From extensive experiments using an information-search game, we show that our method can predict which questions humans are likely to ask in unconstrained settings. We also propose a novel grammar-based question generation framework trained with reinforcement learning, which is able to generate creative questions without supervised human data.

Modeling Question Asking Using Neural Program Generation

Empathy is a complex cognitive ability once thought to be unique to humans (Batson, 2003). However, studies suggest dogs can exhibit empathetic behaviors towards owners in distress (Sanford et al., 2018; Bourg et al., 2020). The current study examines the empathetic capacities of dogs presented with a trapped stranger crying or humming behind a see-through closed door. Opening behavior and physiological markers of stress including heart rate variability (HRV) and coded stress behaviors were measured. Unlike in past research, dogs did not open more or faster for the distressed stranger than the non-distressed stranger. This fits with findings on the importance of familiarity on empathetic responding (deWaal, 2008). Additionally, the HRV and owner-reported fear of dogs in the crying condition were lower for dogs that opened than those that did not, suggesting that like children, dogs must have low personal distress to show empathy (Eisenberg et al., 1996).

Beware of Strangers: Dogs Empathetic Response to Unfamiliar Humans

Species such as humans rely on their excellent visual abilities to perceive and navigate the world. Dogs have co-habited with humans for millennia, yet we know little about how they gather and use visual information to guide decision-making. Across five experiments, we presented pet dogs (N=49) with two foods of unequal value in a 2-alternative choice task, and measured whether dogs showed preferential gazing, and whether visual attention patterns were associated with item choice. Overall, dogs looked significantly longer at the preferred (high value) food over the low value alternative. There was also evidence of item-dependent predictive gaze—dogs looked proportionally longer at the item they subsequently chose. Surprisingly, dogs’ choice behavior was only slightly above chance, despite visual discrimination. These results suggest that dogs use visual information in the environment to inform their choice behavior, but that other factors may also contribute to their decision-making.

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Cognitive Linguistics Support for the Evolution of Language from Animal Cognition

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