Canada

Burns &amp; Krygier (2015) demonstrated that people could exhibit a strong bias towards the smaller first digits, in a way similar to that described by Benford’s law. This paper sought to expand the scope of this phenomenon and to test a possible explanation, the Recognition Hypothesis that a Benford bias is due to life-long environmental exposure to this statistical relationship. Participants completed three numerical tasks: A Generation Task requiring answering trivia questions; a Selection Task requiring selecting between two numerical responses; and an Estimation task requiring estimating the number of jelly beans in a jar. The results found no evidence of any first digit effect in the Recognition Task, some evidence of Benford bias in the Generation Task and strong evidence in the Estimation Task. Future research should focus on alternatives to the Recognition Hypothesis and investigate the parameters of Benford bias in generation tasks

CogSci 2022

Why do People fit to Benford’s Law? – A Test of the Recognition Hypothesis

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was an in-person meeting held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands at the Postillion Hotel & Conference Centre.

**ON-DEMAND PROGRAM ACCESS AFTER THE CONFERENCE** 
Recordings of the invited program are now available. You can access them by clicking on the 'Schedule' icon on the left. Select view by week and navigate to the day and time slot of the recording you wish to view. Click on the time slot to access the recording.

Recordings available (click on each recording to view):

**Thursday, July 25** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Morgan Barense on Enhancing real-world event memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/17997/lecture/99084-dynamics-between-minds-and-the-environment) 
1000: [Gleitman Award Winner Isabelle Dautriche on Language Foundations: Insights from acquisition, communication, cognition, and more](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18000/lecture/99085-gleitman-talk) 
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
1700: [Rumelhart Prize Presentation Speaker Alison Gopnik on Exploit, explore, empower: Three ages and three intelligences](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18028/lecture/99161-rp1-rumelhart-prize-presentation) 

**Friday, July 26** 
0900: [C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize Keynote Speaker Kia Nobre on Focusing in memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18035/lecture/99162-hp1-c-l-de-carvalho-heineken-prize-keynote-address) 
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture) 
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture) 
1745: [Keynote Speaker Andrea E. Martin on Neural dynamics encode the structure and statistics of language](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18077/lecture/99271-neural-dynamics-encode-the-structure-and-statistics-of-language) 

**Saturday, July 27** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Gregor Schöner on How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18083/lecture/99273-dynamics-within-the-mind) 
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture) 
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
<div style="position:relative;padding-top:0;width:900px;height:500px;"><iframe style="position:absolute;border:none;width:100%;height:100%;left:0;top:0;" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/cble/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>


**The Program Book can be downloaded [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yRVp1cBqRnAbdYi4GXWV_pZeyWNsRquv/view?usp=sharing).**

#### **Letter from the President**

Welcome to the 2024 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Rotterdam! CogSci 2024 brings together a large community of cognitive scientists who have traveled here from around the world, as well as a smaller group of remote presenters. I would like to extend an especially warm welcome to our first-time CogSci meeting attendees, and hope that 
their experience inspires them to join our future meetings for many years to come.

I want to thank this year’s conference co-chairs, Larissa K Samuelson, Stefan Frank, Mariya Toneva, Allyson Mackey, and Eliot Hazeltine, for putting together an amazing series of invited talks and symposia around the theme of Dynamics of Cognition. The co-chairs also deserve credit for handling a record-breaking number of submissions and producing a truly exciting conference program 

Beyond the invited talks and symposia dedicated to this year’s conference theme, I would like to highlight the presentations and events honoring the 
Rumelhart, Elman, Gleitman and C .L . de Carvalho Heineken prize winners, including the Rumelhart reception on Thursday. As you may know, we are recording all of the invited talks and symposia, and all prize-winners’ talks, and will be making this content available after the conference. 

The Cognitive Science Society relies on the volunteer efforts of our Governing Board members who work on matters related to our membership; conference policies; diversity and inclusion, international, and outreach initiatives; prizes and much more. We welcome interest from Society members who would like to become more involved in what we do. The 
Society is deeply grateful to Rick Dale and Andrea Bender, who serve as editors of the two Society journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science respectively. We especially acknowledge our editors’ generosity in donating their stipends each year to D&I and outreach efforts. 

This year’s Annual Meeting depends critically on the support of Marischal De Armond and his team at Podium Conference Specialists: Sharon Zwack, Cendrine De Vis, Sarah-Kate Burke, and Rachel Waller worked tirelessly to secure the venue and handled a multitude of logistical and organizational issues, from arranging coffee breaks and receptions to making sure that a huge number of posters fits comfortably into the available space. Finally, and importantly, I would like to acknowledge the Cognitive Science Society Executive Officer, Erica Wojcik, for managing the complex and ever expanding sphere of our Society’s activities.

I hope you enjoy this year’s meeting and the many different opportunities to engage with the vibrant community of cognitive scientists gathered here. I also hope you get a chance to explore the great city of Rotterdam with its many attractions, museums, restaurants and scenic views. If you’d like to talk more about our Society, or simply want to say hello, please stop by!

![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/3c66d0e21fff30e204df1138ffd15173.jpeg)

**Anna Papafragou** 
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

**CODE OF CONDUCT** 
By attending the CogSci 2024 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s [Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-6KkptF0Gn3ZYGJDlpqpwTdImw45Ng0/view?usp=drive_link).

**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY** 
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.

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CogSci 2024

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Burns & Krygier (2015) demonstrated that people could exhibit a strong bias towards the smaller first digits, in a way similar to that described by Benford’s law. This paper sought to expand the scope of this phenomenon and to test a possible explanation, the Recognition Hypothesis that a Benford bias is due to life-long environmental exposure to this statistical relationship. Participants completed three numerical tasks: A Generation Task requiring answering trivia questions; a Selection Task requiring selecting between two numerical responses; and an Estimation task requiring estimating the number of jelly beans in a jar. The results found no evidence of any first digit effect in the Recognition Task, some evidence of Benford bias in the Generation Task and strong evidence in the Estimation Task. Future research should focus on alternatives to the Recognition Hypothesis and investigate the parameters of Benford bias in generation tasks

poster

Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
 [**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Cogsci-2022-PAAG-Detailed-July-12final-1.pdf)
 [**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/DeArmond-CogSci2022-program-v113-final.pdf)

This conference requires a registration to attend. Please use the link below to secure your ticket. The website will be available to all registered attendees on July 25th. 

[Register to Attend](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/registration/)

Registration Is Required

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





The ability to calculate fluently is one of the basic academic skills, but certain students have difficulty acquiring it, such as those with developmental dyscalculia. In this study, we focus on the visual perception of numbers as a factor related to computational fluency, and examine whether enlarging the letters of the numbers or widening the line spacing in a calculation task would increase computational fluency. Four hundred and thirty-six junior high school students were asked to perform a two-digit addition or subtraction task in which font size and line width were manipulated, and the number of correct answers per minute was used as a measure of computational fluency. The results showed that enlarging the font size increased the computational fluency of all participants, and that widening the line spacing contributed to the fluency of participants with low computational skills, while it may decrease that of high computational skills.

How can visual perception of numbers affect computational fluency?

Images are a powerful medium known to induce empathy and emotional response in people. In political protests it has the power for a people-initiated policy change and signifies the deep symbolism of a political system. In this study, we aim to quantify the range of emotional connection a person experiences for photographs of a farmers' protest.The protest was the headlines in all media at the time this experiment was conducted and had polarized public opinion. Each photograph is identified to have a set of physical and semantic features. The three selected features were presence of police, gender and close-up (vs.long-shot) in the frame. The intensity on a range of emotions (fear, disgust, anger, sadness, optimism, pessimism, surprise, shock, happiness, and respect) experienced by the viewer for each feature was collected. By statistical and dimensionality analyses, we isolate and identify influencing factors in an image. We found that the presence of police in aggressive actions and close-up shots of had the highest variation in the emotional responses of participants. Interestingly, the gender of the protesters did not show statistically significant effects. The findings from the exploratory investigation highlights the powerful role photographic features have on emotional responses of people, an understudied but critical factor in a world immersed in social media.

Exploring Empathy and a Range of Emotions Towards Protest Photographs

Threatening stimuli capture visual attention more rapidly than benign stimuli. The canonical interpretation of this robust finding is that the brain evolved a “fear module” enabling rapid detection of threats common at the time of mammalian evolution, such as snakes and spiders. This rapid attentional capture is thought to enable prioritized processing of threatening stimuli, providing a survival advantage, and is assumed to be universal. However, these findings have been documented almost entirely in WEIRD (white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. Here, we address this gap by examining threat detection in a remote African culture, the Himba. Using a touch screen visual search task, we found that both evolutionary-relevant (snakes and spiders) and modern threats (knives and syringes) captured attention more rapidly than benign stimuli. To our knowledge, this is the first study showing that the same kind of threats that rapidly capture visual attention in the West also rapidly capture visual attention in the Himba.

Visual attention to threat in the Himba, a remote people of Namibia

How possessions gain personal meaning has been a topic of interest to diverse fields studying the mind. Traditionally, the personal value of possessions is hypothesized to be driven by their special histories (Belk, 1988). We provide evidence that people value possessions for their ability to regulate distress. During the pandemic, people (N=333) reported having coping-possessions that helped them to regulate emotions (49%), solve problems (26%), or both (25%). Coping-possessions had high personal and monetary values (M=4.82 and 4.45, respectively; one-sample t-tests against midpoint, ps < .001) with problem-focused possessions having higher monetary values than emotion-focused ones (p < .001). The majority of coping-possessions, however, had mundane histories (e.g., bought at a store) rather than noteworthy ones (p < .001), suggesting that the emotional functions of objects contribute to their perceived personal value. This work also has implications for how adults use objects to regulate their emotions (Timpano & Port, 2021).

The emotional value in objects: Insights from coping with the COVID-19 pandemic

Research in event cognition has focused on how people perceive
and remember events under experimental conditions. This
research study aims to explore the temporal duration of
self-reported events from daily life (Sreekumar, et al., 2018;
Zhuang, et al., 2012). The small amount of prior work that
exists suggests that daily event durations have a Gaussian
distribution and that people have prior beliefs that reflect this
reality (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2006). Forty-eight participants
provided activity duration data as they went about their
everyday lives for 14 days. Descriptive analyses and activity
duration modeling (mixture models of gaussian, gamma, normal
and exponential distributions) were used to characterize event
durations within activity types. Results show that most of the
events present an exponential pattern of durations, while others
show a bimodal pattern. Although some preplanned events have
a characteristic time, many daily events have a substantial
exponential component.

How long are real-life events?

Transformer-based language representation models, such as GPT-3 and DeBERTa, have yielded state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including question answering, story generation and information extraction. However, little is currently understood about their ability to make (approximately rational) decisions, even when simple bets with clear net-positive, zero-risk choices are presented. We design a suite of multi-option decision-making experiments in the same vein as other classic studies (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Applying over 20 structural variants of these ‘benchmarks’ (to test for generalization and robustness) to three established language representation models, we use detailed experiments to show that the models lack fundamental decision-making ability, even after several controls. Techniques such as selective fine-tuning can help improve performance partially, but more fundamental NLP research may be needed before such models can be robustly and generally applied in real-world problem domains where decision making is essential.

Evaluating Language Representation Models on Approximately Rational Decision Making Problems

Compositionality has been argued to a necessary component of interpreting language, yet there appear to be many linguistic phenomena that do not overtly exhibit semantic compositional behavior. One of the challenges involves the phenomena of contextual modulations referred to collectively as semantic coercion or logical metonymy. In this paper, we present a computational model that provides the “compositional flexibility” in the interpretation of a verb with its arguments, for such coercive contexts in English. Specifically, we argue that such constructions typically have surface structural correlates in the form of dense paraphrases, and that these forms can be used to model the masked content in the coerced compositional context. We present preliminary results using a transformer architecture on a masked completion task. Our results show that modeling logical metonymy is a challenging task but can be substantially improved by fine-tuning through dense paraphrasing.

Interpreting Logical Metonymy through Dense Paraphrasing

Limits and risks of GPT-3 applications
Recent GPT-3 applications have fed new optimism in AI research. To explore limits and risks, we investigated how far we can get in developing a so-called digital replica of Daniel Dennett, generating text outputs from a large language model trained on Dennett’s philosophical writing. In consultation with Dennett himself, we compare several fine-tuning strategies and evaluate outputs. Analyzing the failures and the successes will allow us to address technical and ethical issues such as:
1. How accurate can such models be with current technology?
2. To what extent (if at all) might it be acceptable to present a model’s outputs as representing an author’s view?
3. Should copyright holders have control over such models?
4. How one can address risks of making such models public (including possible over-reliance on their accuracy)?
5. How good are experts and non-experts in distinguishing humans from replicas?

Limits and risks of GPT-3 applications

The impressive recent performance of large language models such as GPT-3 has led many to wonder to what extent they can serve as models of general intelligence or are similar to human cognition. We address this issue by applying GPT-3 to a classic problem in human inductive reasoning known as property induction. Our results suggest that while GPT-3 can qualitatively mimic human performance for some inductive phenomena (especially those that depend primarily on similarity relationships), it reasons in a qualitatively distinct way on phenomena that require more theoretical understanding. We propose that this emerges due to the reasoning abilities of GPT-3 rather than its underlying representations, and suggest that increasing its scale is unlikely to change this pattern.

Human-like property induction is a challenge for large language models

In an agent-based simulation, we investigate the implications of social interaction and cognitive diversity on creative processes of divergent thinking. Agents performed a verbal association task individually and jointly in pairs. We created pairs of varying cognitive diversity by manipulating properties of the vector spaces defining their semantic memory. We find that cognitive diversity positively stimulates the flexibility of agents’ collective cognitive search, giving rise to higher fluency (more solutions) and originality (more ‘rare’ solutions). While cognitively similar agents tend to exploit local semantic neighborhoods, diversity promotes more explorative search, with longer distances traveled in semantic space. This helps diverse pairs reach more distant areas of semantic space and escape cognitive fixation. However, our model also suggests that too high levels of diversity can have detrimental effects, as overly exploratory behaviors make pairs leave solution saturated areas prematurely and increase the risk of reaching semantic “dead ends”.

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How can visual perception of numbers affect computational fluency?

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Benford’s Law: Testing the Effects of Distributions and Anchors on Number Estimation