Canada

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”.

CogSci 2022

Cognitive diversity promotes collective creativity: an agent-based simulation

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

technical paper

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)
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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. 





Pursuing the mechanisms and methods to improve the creative potential in team activities becomes significant in modern society. One candidate of the creative method is LEGO Serious Play (LSP), where intuitive modelling with LEGO blocks, corresponding to Play in LSP, is considered effective in teams’ creative problem-solving. To understand the mechanism for Play to influence creativity in interpersonal interactions, we compared Play (intuitive modelling) and Non-Play modelling with LEGO blocks. Our experiments consisted of two phases, individual and collaborative modelling, and two groups conducted the former phase, intuitive modelling before thinking (Play) and thinking before modelling (Non-Play). We found that Play significantly promoted utterances about abstract concepts during the collaborative phase, while utterances about concrete models showed no difference between the two groups. This finding suggests that the interplay between mentioning abstract concepts and handling concrete objects may be a mechanism of Play as intuitive modelling to improve team creativity.

Play as intuitive modelling for fostering creativity in interacion

What factors induce empathy for virtual agents? To explore this question, we examine the relationship between humans and agents in the inverted cyberball task where a participant chose to help an ostracised agent. This study especially controls experience in the preparation task from self-involvement as the base of empathy. In the one condition, participants have induced the same experience as the ostracised agent, while in the other condition, participants observed ostracising relations between two agents. As a result, self-involvement in the preparation task does not influence the helping behavior of the ostracised agent. The factor relating to the helping behavior is whether the participants noticed the relation. This notice was also associated with empathy trait. From these results, we can conclude that empathy can acquire others' perspectives even when they have no experience with the pain of ostracism.

Effect of self-experience on empathic helping to virtual agents

Inferring others' preferences is one of the central cognitive tasks of social life. The inferred preferences are used to predict the behavior of others in novel situations; therefore, a certain level of abstraction is required. We considered the inference of preferences as a classification problem on an abstract latent feature space. Participants (n=96) were asked to show 89 images of automobiles to either an agent that had been programmed with a specific person's preference and which showed facial expressions according to that preference or an agent that did not show facial expressions. Next, participants were asked to predict the agent's likes and dislikes for novel 23 automobiles. The results showed that participants could predict the agent's likes and dislikes for the unseen automobiles with 74% accuracy, indicating that they learned the decision boundary of agents' preferences on the latent feature space using expressions of emotion as labels.

People learn other's preferences on a latent feature space using emotion expressions as labels

The ancient Greek hero Ulysses chose to bind himself to resist the temptation of Sirens, highlighting the fact that humans may voluntarily sacrifice their freedom of choice to achieve committed goals. In this work, we propose a computational model for such commitment under the framework of Bayesian Theory of Mind. The model is based on the idea that even when alone, humans act to better demonstrate their intentions to an imagined third-party observer (ITO) censoring their actions. Our model successfully captures the Ulysses-constraint of freedom, as the freedom confuses the ITO’s inference of their intention. We further show that, trajectories generated both by human actors and actors modeled with ITO censorship are easy to interpret both in the eyes of an actual human ob- server and an ITO. The results demonstrate that under conflict- ing desires, humans achieve commitment by spontaneously censoring their actions with an internalized theory of mind.

Intentional commitment through an internalized theory of mind: Acting in the eyes of an imagined observer

People collaborate daily to achieve joint goals, negotiating sidewalks, preparing meals, constructing furniture. Here we analyzed how strangers coordinate a complex novel task, assembling a TV cart. Before beginning and before major actions, partners used a photo of the completed cart, speech, and gesture to establish a joint model of the structure of the completed cart. Most coordination was implicit, a conversation of actions that could be understood in the context of the current state of the object and the shared mental representation. Actions served a dual purpose, both to communicate and to advance the task. The basic unit of coordination was the dyad, not the individual.

Explicit and Implicit Coordination of Joint Action

Although pointing is sparse, overloaded, and indirect, it allows humans to effectively decode shared information, (ex)change their minds, and plan accordingly. Pointing is an invitation to jointly attend to an object, which triggers the mutual inference between agents of each other’s mind. Relevance is a fundamental assumption underlying all human communication, including pointing. We define relevance as how much a signaler’s belief can make a positive difference to its receiver’s well being. We build a Theory of Mind (ToM) model to test our definition of relevance and use pointing as a case study. In two experiments, we test our relevance model in a classic artificial intelligence (AI) task, the Wumpus world, with the key difference that there is a guide that points to help a hunter. Agents with our relevance model gain significantly higher rewards than agents who ignore signals from the guide. Agents with our model also achieve better performance than agents who receive an additional observation of the environment. The results show that the power of pointing comes from the ToM inference of relevance, rather than providing more precise individual perception.

What Is the point? a Theory of Mind Model of Relevance

Testing on previously learned materials can enhance the learning of new materials studied after the test (the forward effect of testing). We examined how the timing of interim testing influenced subsequent learning. Participants studied trivia facts in two learning sections (A & B) and provided a mental effort rating for each section. Between the two sections, participants either restudied, took an immediate test, or a 15-min delayed test on Section A. They then proceeded to Section B and took a final test on both sections. The results demonstrated that both the immediate and delayed testing groups outperformed the restudy group on Section B, indicating that the forward effect of testing was independent of the test timing. Furthermore, the testing groups showed a bigger increase in their mental effort from Section A to B than the restudy group, suggesting that the forward testing effect occurred probably due to more mental effort.

Does delayed interim testing enhance subsequent learning?

Computational cognitive theories of Autism Spectrum Disorder have received renewed attention in recent years. Consistent with the predictive processing framework, ASD has
been re-conceptualized as a disorder of aberrant prediction and learning-rate estimation involving multiple levels of a putative cognitive computational hierarchy. Specifically, behavioral symptoms of individuals with ASD might manifest due to an aberrant overestimation of the volatility of environmental contingencies (i.e. tendency of change in cue-outcome probabilities) which in turn might induce a dysfunctional setting of learning rates. In this work, we attempted to conceptually replicate computational modeling analyses of an impactful study of the recent ASD modeling literature in an independent
sample of subjects. We were not able to replicate some prior reported effects likely due to differences in model architecture and cognitive task setup. We found statistical trends in similar directions.

Modeling aberrant volatility estimates in Autism Spectrum Disorder

While problem-solving is central in our daily life, its underlying mechanisms remain elusive. The dominant theory states that one must restructure a problem (i.e., reorganize problem-related representations) to solve it. As empirical evidence supporting this mechanism is scarce, we used network science methodology to demonstrate the key role of restructuring in problem-solving. Individual semantic memory networks were estimated before and after participants attempted to solve a riddle. These networks represent the organization of solution-relevant and irrelevant words as nodes, with edges representing the strength of the relationship between them based on the participants’ relatedness judgments. Restructuring was quantified as the difference in semantic network metrics between pre- and post-solving phases. Successful problem-solving was predicted by local semantic network restructuring, only in edges and nodes assessed as helpful to solve the riddle. These results shed new light on the mental restructuring in problem-solving and provide a new method to quantify it.

Restructuring problem-related semantic associations promotes solving success

Logico-semantic theories have long noted parallels between the linguistic representation of temporal entities (events) and spatial entities (objects): bounded (or telic) predicates such as fix a car resemble count nouns such as sandcastle because they are “atoms” with well-defined boundaries. By contrast, unbounded (or atelic) phrases such as drive a car resemble mass nouns such as sand in that they are unspecified for atomic features. Here, we show for the first time that there are similarities in the perceptual-cognitive representation of events and objects in non-linguistic tasks. Specifically, after viewers form a bounded or an unbounded event category, they can extend the category to objects or substances respectively (Experiment 1). Furthermore, viewers can intuitively make event-to-object mappings that respect atomicity (Experiment 2). These striking similarities between the mental representation of events and objects have implications for current theories of event cognition, as well as the relationship between language and thought.

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Play as intuitive modelling for fostering creativity in interacion

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