Canada

Children are navigating a world with massive amounts of auditory input, sometimes relevant while other times purely noise, and must somehow make sense of it all. The early auditory environment is critical for speech perception and recognition, auditory discrimination, and word learning, all of which support language outcomes. What strategies do children use to learn in noisy environments? One potential strategy is environmental selection, which allows children to seek environments that align with particular goals. In the current paper, we examined whether children and adults make decisions about their environments by integrating auditory information and goal-states. While 3- and 4-year olds struggle with discriminating the level of noise in noisy speech streams (and likely do not use this information for environmental selection), 5-year-old children and adults can. Further, we show initial evidence that they can use this information to reason about acoustic environments that are consistent with specific goals.

CogSci 2022

Selection of goal-consistent acoustic environments by adults and preschool-aged children

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**
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#### **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.

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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.

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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.
 
 [**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. 





Though high-confidence identifications from a police lineup can provide strong evidence of guilt, confidence in a lineup rejection often provides little additional information beyond the rejection itself. Here, we investigate whether participants use different decision rules for positive identifications vs. lineup rejections. In this experiment, we compared confidence ratings from a standard simultaneous lineup (where confidence in the lineup rejection is not applied to any particular face) to the confidence ratings from a rate-them-all simultaneous lineup (where confidence that a person is or is not the perpetrator is applied to every face in the lineup). We hypothesize that, in the case of a lineup rejection, confidence in the standard condition will be best predicted by the average memory signal in the rate-them-all condition. The possible reliance on an average memory signal could help to explain why previous research has not found a strong confidence-accuracy relationship for lineup rejections.

Decision Variables in the Case of Police Lineup Rejections

From writing to hiking, people’s real-world sequential decision-making often benefits from “undoing” (e.g. deleting sentences or backtracking). Surprisingly, undoing has not been studied in experiments on human planning. To investigate how much, when, and why people undo, we introduce a task that is a cross between the “Traveling Salesperson” and the “Knapsack” problems with an undo option. Within a length budget, subjects sequentially connect as many dots as possible on a map. On “undo” trials, they are allowed to take back actions without constraints. We find that undoing is beneficial, that subjects exhibit great individual variability in the number of undos, that undos are more frequent after errors than after correct actions, and that long response times tend to precede sequences of undos. Together, these results suggest that undo actions serve a dual role of correcting errors and of exploring alternative paths, where path evaluation benefits from full play-outs.

Undoing in human planning

Geometric analogy problems remain an intriguing part of intelligence scales, which is closely correlated to many cognitive studies, such as perception, conception, memory, abstract and inductive reasoning. The problems not only target the most fundamental element --- analogy-making --- in human cognition, but also require integration of multiple components and stages: looking at the test booklet, thinking for a minute or two, and deciding the answer. Great efforts and achievements have been made to explain different individual aspects of this process. In this paper, we take a more holistic approach from the perspective of problem-solving, by modeling the entire process, from the moment the visual stimuli are received to the moment an answer is decided. Therefore, we explore how the final solution can be built upon visual inputs and necessary components that lie between the perceptual input and conceptual output. Particularly, we designed a novel similarity metric and a correspondence-finding method based on mapping and optimization. With these two basic blocks, we implemented a computational model, and report our initial results on a classical problem set.

An End-to-End Imagery-Based Modeling of Solving Geometric Analogy Problems

In STEM instruction, the effectiveness of teaching by analogy is often limited by students’ focus on superficial features of the source and target exemplars; the strategy of progressive alignment (moving from perceptually similar to different targets) has been suggested to address this issue (Gentner & Hoyos, 2017). In contrast, computational models suggest maximizing surface feature variation to improve the relation learning, and human behavioral studies find a relational bias in learning (Austerweil & Ehrens, 2018). Here, participants were explicitly instructed to match stimuli based on relations while perceptual similarity of stimuli varied parametrically. We found that lower perceptual similarity reduced accurate relational matching (F = 9.53, p<.001), and observed a similar trend for reaction times. This finding demonstrates that perceptual similarity may interfere with relational judgements, but also hints at why progressive alignment may be effective. Implications for instructional sequence design will be discussed.

Perceptual Similarity Affects Relational Judgements

Understanding abstract relations, and reasoning about various instantiations of the same relation, is an important marker in human cognition. Here we focus on development of understanding for the concept of antonymy. We examined whether four- and five-year-olds (N= 67) are able to complete an analogy task involving antonyms, whether language cues facilitate children’s ability to reason about the antonym relation, and how their performance compares with that of two vector-based computational models. We found that explicit relation labels in the form of a relation phrase (“opposites”) improved performance on the task for five-year-olds but not four-year-olds. Five-year-old (but not four-year-old) children were more accurate for adjective and verb antonyms than for noun antonyms. Two computational models showed substantial variability in performance across different lexical classes, and in some cases fell short of children’s accuracy levels. These results suggest that young children acquire a solid understanding of the abstract relation of opposites, and can generalize it to various instantiations across different lexical classes. These developmental results challenge relation models based on vector semantics, and highlight the importance of examining performance across different parts of speech.

Children’s Acquisition of the Concept of Antonym Across Different Lexical Classes

Analogy plays an important role in cognitive development, but children often need cognitive supports to draw correct ones. Here, we examined the role of conceptual knowledge in proportional analogies, which are often depicted as a simple exercise in pattern completion. In Study 1, adults and children (N = 321) completed 4-term analogy tasks featuring letters, lines, integers, or fractions. Performance was lowest for fractions, and strongly impacted by educational background. In Study 2, we conducted an educational intervention focusing on either conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, or both for 3rd-to-5th graders (N = 343) using a pretest-training-posttest design. Children with poor pretest magnitude knowledge were more likely to fail analogical reasoning, and training on conceptual knowledge that fractions denote magnitudes improved children’s analogies. Together, these studies indicate that knowledge of fractional magnitudes is important to proportional analogy.

Conceptual Prerequisites for Proportional Analogy

One of the advantages of using metaphorical expressions over literal ones might be that speakers can convey not only the intended property, but also its degree. 
For example, when hearing “John is a shark”, the listener might infer that the speaker aims to communicate that John is as mean as a typical shark. 
We present experimental findings supporting this hypothesis, along with a novel metaphor interpretation model, which is implemented within the Rational Speech Act framework.
We compare our model's predictions to those of an existing RSA model of metaphor understanding, within which the listener infers just the presence or absence of a feature as opposed to its degree, and find that our model produces a significantly better fit.

Pragmatics of Metaphor Revisited: Modeling the Role of Degree and Salience in Metaphor Understanding

Structural priming is a heavily studied and multi-faceted phenomenon. Essentially, when other factors are equal, syntax shows a tendency to repeat across utterances with potential gains in fluency (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). Lexical repetition, particularly repetition of the verb between utterances enhances structural priming significantly (Mahowald et al., 2016), but this lexical-boost is not as long-lasting (Hartsuiker et al., 2008). Previous research on structural priming has heavily leaned on measures of syntactic choice, but a few studies have also measured initiation time (Smith & Wheeldon, 2001). The current study looks to differentiate effects of lexical and structural repetition benefits in initiation latency as a measure of potential fluency increases in sentence production. Results suggest that benefits in fluency are dependent on lexical and structural repetition.

Does Positional Level Structural Priming Depend on the Verb?

Complement coercion interpretation is typically operationalized in terms of verb paraphrases (she finished the book > she finished reading the book), reflecting the construal of a specific event triggered by the direct object (cf. Pustejovsky & Bouillon). However, when given the option, participants frequently, and selectively, refrain from providing verb paraphrases for naturally occurring sentences.

We present a corpus study of the pragmatic factors that affect the rate of refraining from giving a verb paraphrases, followed by two experiments. First, a fill-in-the-blank experiment shows that minimally different clause types containing complement coercion yield different rates of verb paraphrase. Second, we pair complement coercion sentences with possible verb paraphrases and obtain semantic (entailment) judgements from participants. Taken together, the results present a puzzle; participants’ likelihood to produce a verbal coercion interpretation is modulated by contextual factors, while their semantic comprehension of potential verb paraphrases for the same sentences is not.

Two measures for complement coercion interpretation: Interpretation vs production for complement coercion

Syntactic adaptation to short-term exposure has been documented with both single-trial priming and cumulative priming paradigms. These studies usually involve repeated exposure to the same structure (e.g. reduced relative clauses), and therefore it remains open whether people can track context-dependent regularities through short-term exposure. In the current study, we present a self-paced-reading experiment that investigates context-dependent syntactic adaptation by manipulating the relationship between the animacy feature of the subject NP (animate vs. inanimate) and the corresponding parse of a verb following a subject NP. We analyzed the results in terms of a log-linear model for context-dependent syntactic adaptation. The results suggest that comprehenders can track and adapt to cue-based distributional regularities, but only when the short-term regularities are consistent with the long-term ones existent in their native language.

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Decision Variables in the Case of Police Lineup Rejections

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