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Having an intention (or not) forms a categorisation system for learning. Correspondingly, incidental learning stands for learning without intention to learn. The current paper examines the influences of incidental and intentional learning. 170 adults participated in three experimental studies. In each experiment, participants examined some animal illustrations and read paragraphs about them. In the first study, animal illustrations were arranged as being common (i.e., low curiosity) or novel to examine the effect of curiosity. Low curiosity level was more effective on incidental learning and vice versa for intentional learning. In the second study, mental time travel manipulation showed focusing on current time increased intentional learning. In the third study, the effect of arousal was examined via the tempo of the music (i.e., faster tempo for high arousal level). Low arousal level increased incidental learning. Ultimately, curiosity, mental time travel, and arousal could be essential in intentional and incidental learning.

CogSci 2022

Predictors of Incidental and Intentional Learning: Curiosity, Construal Level, and Musical Arousal

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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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.
 
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Parallel accounts of interference resulting from the generation of related words can be found in the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) and the cumulative semantic interference literatures. Recent work on the language production side suggests that the same adaptive learning process may underlie both. However, the literatures remain separate. They use different procedures and dependent measures, and theoretical accounts focus on underlying conceptual representations (memory research) vs. conceptual-lexical links (language research). We propose that the accounts should be reconciled. As an initial step toward this goal we combined a retrieval/generation procedure with a continuous picture-naming test phase to assess their combined effects on interference. We observed both costs and benefits in error data. There were more naming errors (including many time-outs) for non-generated items from activated categories and fewer for previously generated items. Perhaps due to a too-severe cutoff, naming times did not show a RIF influence, only a marginal facilitation effect for generated items. However, naming time showed typical cumulative interference within the picture-naming phase independent of previous retrieval experience. Future work will investigate the locus of interference in conceptual memory representations versus in links to word representations with the goal of producing a unified account of semantic interference.

Aligning Language and Memory Accounts of Semantic Interference

The current information ecosystem has made it difficult to judge the veracity of information. Presumably, evaluating an informational source’s expertise aids in this judgment process. However, whether these judgements influence memory for that information is unclear. In this study, we investigate the extent to which a source's expertise influences recognition memory for explanations given by that source. Participants viewed 20 vignettes describing events and two potential explanations for each event. Each explanation was either said by a source (domain expert vs. non-expert) or given without a source. Participants were exposed to both source and no-source conditions. We investigated whether participants’ recognition of explanations were predicted by condition and source expertise. Our findings indicated that neither condition nor source expertise influenced participants' performance on the recognition task. This suggests that people either do not attend to source in their evaluations of explanations or do not encode these evaluations.

Does Being an Expert Matter? The Influence of Source Expertise on Recognition Memory

Previous demonstrations of false memories for predicted but not presented words used slow encoding and immediate retrieval conditions, potentially exacerbating false memory effects. We present two experiments that investigated whether false memories also occur under self-paced encoding and delayed retrieval conditions, and whether false memories are reduced when the initial prediction was disconfirmed by an implausible word, thought to elicit false memory suppression. Results showed that previous demonstrations of false memories were not contingent on the task conditions: False memories also occur when language processing is self-paced, and they affect longer-term memory structures. Crucially, false memories emerged regardless of whether the prediction-disconfirming word was plausible or not. Results are evaluated against a recent psycho-linguistic account that makes diverging predictions regarding the processing consequences of mild and severe violations of plausibility.

Uninvited and unwanted: False memories for words predicted but not seen

We investigated whether schema congruency differentially affects low level sensory processing (eye gaze) compared to higher-level cognition (memory). Participants performed a two-phase eye tracking task; first a baseline phase with only congruent cartoon events, and subsequently an experimental phase in which the same events were adapted to remain congruent or become incongruent to a theme. Results revealed that participants became quicker in recognizing the congruent cartoon events compared to incongruent in the experimental phase, indicating improved memory for congruent cartoon events. No mean difference in gaze towards congruent versus incongruent events was observed. Surprisingly, a slight bias towards gazing to the left side of the screen in the baseline phase diminished during the experimental phase, indicating that the schema congruency manipulation might affect gaze behavior. Taken together, our results suggest that our schema congruency manipulation affects gaze behavior and memory, but further eye tracking analysis could reveal the dynamic nature of this effect.

Effect of stimuli congruency on gaze behavior and memory

Our ability to forget on demand is called intentional forgetting, and it can be examined using the item-method directed forgetting paradigm. Recently, an inhibition account has gained popularity, arguing that to-be-forgotten (F) items are inhibited in working memory to impair their representations in long-term memory. In a series of experiments, we tested predictions from this inhibitory account by increasing the item and cue durations, respectively. Inhibition predicts decreased recognition for F items with increasing duration. In item recognition, increasing item duration increased memory for both to-be-remembered (R) and F items, in line with a selective rehearsal account of directed forgetting. There was no differential effect of cue duration on memory for R and F items. In associative recognition, increasing item duration increased memory for both R and F items but increasing cue duration increased memory only for R items, which is counter to an inhibition account.

How Increasing Item and Cue Duration Influence Item-Method Directed Forgetting

Humans are able to intentionally forget declarative memory content as demonstrated in directed-forgetting (DF) experiments. Yet, only few studies assessed whether DF affects associations in procedural memory. We tested how the intention to remember/forget a stimulus affected the formation and/or retrieval of stimulus-response (S-R) associations. To do so, we combined an item-specific priming paradigm with list-method DF. We did not find an impact of the intention to remember/forget on either the retrieval of existing or the formation of new S-R associations: Although participants formed S-R associations (evident in decreasing RTs over stimulis’ prime instances), their persisting activation did not impact on RTs in a subsequent item-recognition-test. Potentially, processes contributing to item recognition impeded S-R retrieval. This finding is informative for future studies aiming to assess how intention differentially affects procedural and declarative memory. We formulate experimental design recommendations for future studies assessing the impact of DF on item-specific S-R associations.

Intentional Forgetting of Habits? Combining List-Method Directed Forgetting and Item-Specific Stimulus-Response Priming

Children’s production of mental state verbs can reveal evidence of their theory of mind and general cognitive development. Children produce a certain class of mental state verbs, namely desire verbs such as want, wish, and hope, early in development. Among these desire verbs, they produce want the most frequently. We report on a corpus study of 450+ instances of want as gathered from children’s dialogues with caretakers in the CHILDES database. We developed a novel coding scheme to measure children’s use and understanding of want utterances: i.e., we sought to track the contents of their desires and the agents children predicated desires about. We report on the frequencies of these features across the ages of 2- 4, and highlight noteworthy trends in the way children learn to use want. Children appear to talk about their own desires most often; they primarily use questions to talk about second person desires; and they desire more complex objects as they mature. We describe how these patterns of linguistic competency may serve as an index of a developing theory of mind.

How children talk about their desires: A corpus study of ‘want’

Rule-based learning is an important aspect of language acquisition. Yang (2005,2016) proposed the Tolerance Principle (TP) to predict when a rule will be formed by the language learner. We present the derivation of the TP as originally proposed and test it on both hypothetical data and corpus data from 8 children. Results for the hypothetical data contradict the TP’s predictions, as do the data from 7 of the 8 children. We conclude that the original form of the TP does not explain rule-learning.

Intolerant Data: Testing The Tolerance Principle

Learning to establish joint reference is an important milestone of communicative and linguistic development. Pointing is one of the first entry points into this process, since gestures often precede verbal communication. During early development, as well as later language use, pointing and linguistic utterances interact in many ways, complementing each other. However, little is known about the development of this relationship during development. In this paper, we focus on the development of the co-occurrence of finger pointing and accompanying utterances in two different cultures: Russia and Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Eastern Nepal). We show that despite the differences in environment, the development of finger pointing and accompanying language use show substantial similarities. Early on, a larger proportion of points is not accompanied by language. As the children's linguistic abilities develop, children first use language to specify what is being pointed at, and later elaborate on some aspect of the referent.

How Do Children Combine Pointing and Language in the Earliest Stages of Development? A Case Study of Russian and Chintang

It has been conjectured that verb learning is hard because verb meanings are not readily "packaged'' from the physical world. To provide new empirical evidence on this account, we analyzed egocentric video collected from natural toy-play interaction and focused on the naming events when action verbs were uttered in parent speech. Using the Human Simulation Paradigm, we showed egocentric videos of those naming events to adult observers and asked them to guess the target verb in parent speech. We found that adult observers used many different verbs to describe the same visual event, and only one of them matched with the verb in parent speech. We analyzed mismatched verbs and identified several sources of mismatch, and found that all of the mismatched verbs are relevant to the target verb, but they capture different properties (temporal, semantic, etc) of the visual event. We also found that different naming events for the same verb also differ in terms of the degree of ambiguity. Taken together, the results in the present paper provided new evidence from the child’s view, showing that verb learning is hard not only because multiple possible meanings are embedded in each learning situation, but also because these candidate meanings expand across multiple dimensions of the physical world, overlap with each other, and relate to the target meaning in many different ways.

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Aligning Language and Memory Accounts of Semantic Interference

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