Canada

Research in cognitive science indicates that the effects of corrective feedback are powerful, but quite variable. Stemming from the Feedback Intervention Theory, we tested two features of feedback that may influence the learner’s attention to the self and ultimately their performance. In this zoom-based experiment, 6 to 8 year old children (N = 102) completed an online learning activity focused on solving mathematical equivalence problems. During the learning activity, children were assigned to different conditions which varied both feedback source (person vs. computer) and feedback type (correct-answer vs. correct-answer+verification). Feedback source was found to affect accuracy, where computer-based feedback resulted in higher accuracy compared to person-based feedback. Additionally, feedback type was found to affect strategy variability. Low knowledge children were more likely to use a variety of different strategies when they received correct-answer only feedback, while high knowledge children were less affected by the presence or absence of verification cues.

CogSci 2022

The source and type of feedback influence children&#39;s mathematics performance

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.

You need to log in with the email address you registered with. Access credentials have been sent to your email. 

Please be sure to check your spam and other email folders if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in to explore this event.

It looks like you are not registered for this event. 

To access the site please register [**here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/registration/). 

Please register!

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.

The source and type of feedback influence children's mathematics performance

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)
 [**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. 





Facebook sends users friend suggestions when they have friends in common with others. However, how do people actually consider mutual friendships when inferring whether two individuals are friends? We examined how people (N=352) rely on numerical factors when judging whether individuals are friends based on their mutual connections. Participants saw two target individuals and their friends within a group, and judged if the targets were friends with each other. Experiment 1 manipulated the number of mutual friends and the number of friends each target had. Experiment 2 manipulated the proportion of these two factors. People were more likely to infer friendships when I) targets had more mutual friends; II) targets had fewer friends each; and III) there was a high proportion of mutual friends, which are all factors that impact the likelihood of targets’ friendship. In sum, people consider relevant numerical information about mutual friends when making friendship judgments.


Inferring friendships from mutual connections

We describe UMA (Unified Model of Arithmetic), a theory of children’s arithmetic implemented as a computational model. UMA extends a theory of fraction arithmetic (Braithwaite et al., 2017) to include arithmetic with whole numbers and decimals. We evaluated UMA in the domain of decimal arithmetic by training the model on problems from a math textbook series, then testing it on decimal arithmetic problems that were solved by 6th and 8th graders in a previous study. UMA’s test performance closely matched that of children, supporting three assumptions of the theory: (1) most errors reflect small deviations from standard procedures, (2) between-problem variations in error rates reflect the distribution of input that learners receive, and (3) individual differences in strategy use reflect underlying variation in learning parameters.

Testing a Unified Model of Arithmetic

Common critiques of natural language processing (NLP)
methods cite their lack of multimodal sensory information,
claiming an inability to learn situated, action-oriented relations
through language alone. Barsalou’s (1983) theory of
ad hoc categories, which are formed from to achieve goals in
real-world scenarios, correspond theoretically to those types
of relations with which language models ought to have great
difficulty. Recent NLP models have developed dynamic approaches
to word representations, where the same word can
have different encodings depending on the context in which it
appears. Testing these models using categorization tasks with
human response data demonstrates that situated properties may
be partially captured through semantic analysis. We discuss
possible ways in which different notions of situatedness may
be distinguished for future development and testing of NLP
models.

Getting Situated: Comparative Analysis of Language Models With Experimental Categorization Tasks

Semantic features have been playing a central role in investigating the nature of our conceptual representations. Yet the time and effort required to sample features from human raters has restricted their use to a limited set of manually curated concepts. Given recent success of transformer-based language models, we asked whether it was possible to use such models to automatically generate meaningful lists of properties for arbitrary object concepts and whether these models would produce features similar to those found in humans. We probed a GPT-3 model to generate semantic features for 1,854 objects and compared them to existing human feature norms. GPT-3 showed a similar distribution in the types of features and similar performance in predicting similarity, relatedness, and category membership. Together these results highlight the potential of large language models to capture important facets of human knowledge and yield a new approach for automatically generating interpretable feature sets.

Semantic features of object concepts generated with GPT-3

We present a neural dynamic model that perceptually grounds nested noun phrases, i.e., noun phrases that contain further (possibly also nested) noun phrases as parts. The model receives input from the visual array and a representation of a noun phrase from language processing. It organizes a search for the denoted object in the visual scene. The model is a neural dynamic architecture of interacting neural populations which has clear interfaces with perceptual processes. It solves a set of theoretical challenges, including the problem of keeping a nested structure in short-term memory in a way that solves the problem of 2 and massive binding problem emphasized by Jackendoff (2002). The model organizes a search for the objects that are referenced in that structure. We motivate the model, demonstrate simulation results, and discuss how it differs from related models.

A Neural Dynamic Model Perceptually Grounds Nested Noun Phrases

Human language offers a powerful window into our thoughts -- we tell stories, give explanations, and express our beliefs and goals through words. Abundant evidence also suggests that language plays a developmental role in structuring our learning. Here, we ask: how much of human-like thinking can be captured by learning statistical patterns in language alone? We first contribute a new challenge benchmark for comparing humans and distributional large language models (LLMs). Our benchmark contains two problem-solving domains (planning and explanation generation) and is designed to require generalization to new, out-of-distribution problems expressed in language. We find that humans are far more robust than LLMs on this benchmark. Next, we propose a hybrid Parse-and-Solve model, which augments distributional LLMs with a structured symbolic reasoning module. We find that this model shows more robust adaptation to out-of-distribution planning problems, demonstrating the promise of hybrid AI models for more human-like reasoning.

Structured, flexible, and robust: benchmarking and improving large language models towards more human-like behavior in out-of-distribution reasoning tasks

Limited evidence shows that visual input can facilitate learning novel sound-to-meaning mappings that are crucial to learning a second language. However, the mechanisms by which visual information influences auditory learning are still unclear. Here, we investigate to what extent visual input can lead to effective learning in another domain. We trained atonal speakers with Mandarin tones in 4 conditions: Auditory Only (AO) where only auditory tones were given as input; Animated Contour (AC) where moving visual pitch contours indicating the dynamic changes of tones were given in addition to auditory tones; Static Contour (SC) where static visual pitch contours were given in addition to auditory tones; Incongruent Contour (IC) where mismatched pitch contours were given in addition to auditory tones. The results show the advantage of AC and SC over AO in learning tonal categories and that IC inhibits learning, suggesting that extracting ‘compatible’ properties cross modalities benefits learning most.

Cross-modal perceptual learning in learning a tonal language

Some linguistic features are more readily learned than others, and are thereby more likely to be maintained in diachronic language change, giving rise to typological universals. Less readily learned features may give rise to typological gaps. We consider an apparent typological gap—that a morphologically superlative determiner (e.g., gleebest in "gleebest of the cows") with a negative meaning is cross-linguistically unattested—and ask whether it reflects an underlying learning bias. We find 4-year-olds know that such determiners indicate quantity (replicating Wellwood, Gagliardi, & Lidz, 2016), but only when positive (‘most’), but not negative (‘least’). Importantly, the observed bias is not specific to the apparent typological gap: same-age children showed difficulty learning the negative meaning of a non-superlative determiner, though such meanings are attested. The data thus suggest that children are generally biased against negativity, consistent with much prior work on conceptual bias and language learning/processing.

"Most" is easy but "least" is hard: Novel determiner learning in 4-year-olds

Child-directed language (CDL) features words such as doggy, night-night, and tummy that are rarely used in adult-directed language (ADL). Characteristics of CDL variants, such as diminutivization and reduplication, explain why they may be learned and produced earlier by children. However, it is not yet clear how or when children switch to using ADL equivalents—dog, goodnight, stomach. Through analysis of speech transcripts from CHILDES and the Language Development Project corpus, we show that children significantly increase their production of ADL variants across age, with the average CDL-to-ADL transition point at 2.5 years. Many of the linguistic features that distinguish CDL vs. ADL registers (e.g., lexical and syntactic complexity) similarly differentiated the local speech contexts surrounding CDL vs. ADL variants in children’s input. Notably, these differences emerged even in speech that was primarily child-directed. Learners may therefore be able to capitalize on these linguistic cues to support their discovery of register along with context-appropriate CDL/ADL pair use.

From doggy to dog: Developmental shis in children's use of register-specific words

Historically, metaphors have facilitated creative change across multiple disparate domains. Similarly, human adults use metaphors to guide their everyday thinking and reasoning. While previous research in cognitive development has demonstrated that preschoolers understand metaphors, less is known about how preschoolers might learn from metaphors. The current experiments investigate whether preschoolers can use novel metaphors to make additional inferences about artifacts. Experiment 1 demonstrates that both four-year-olds and adults who hear novel positive and negative metaphors (e.g., “Daxes are clouds. Daxes are not suns.”) can form additional inferences based on these metaphor (e.g., that daxes let out water rather than light up). Experiment 2 conceptually replicates this result using a modified paradigm with only positive metaphors (e.g., “Daxes are clouds”). Taken together, these findings suggest that children can not only understand, but also learn from, metaphors. Consequently, metaphors may be a powerful learning mechanism in both adulthood and early childhood.

Premium content

Downloads

Next from CogSci 2022

Inferring friendships from mutual connections

Similar lecture

The benefits of live in person feedback on children’s mathematics performance