Canada

Computational feasibility is a widespread concern that guides the framing and modeling of biological and artificial intelligence. The specification of cognitive system capacities is often shaped by unexamined intuitive assumptions about the search space and complexity of a subcomputation. However, a mistaken intuition might make such initial conceptualizations misleading for what empirical questions appear relevant later on. We undertake here computational-level modeling and complexity analyses of segmentation - a widely hypothesized subcomputation that plays a requisite role in explanations of capacities across domains - as a case study to show how crucial it is to formally assess these assumptions. We mathematically prove two sets of results regarding hardness and search space size that may run counter to intuition, and position their implications with respect to existing views on the subcapacity.

CogSci 2022

Computational Complexity of Segmentation

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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#### About

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.

#### Our History 

* **Society Creation**<br>
The Society was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts in 1979. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. 
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* **Conference Creation**<br>
The first conference on cognitive science was held at La Jolla, California in August, 1979, and has occurred annually since then. The proceedings of each conference are published, and those from most years are available through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The annual proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference represent a major source of information on new work and new ideas in the scientific study of thinking. In 1990, the Society, with help from an anonymous donor, established the David Marr Prize for the best student paper at each annual meeting.
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* **Journal Creation**<br>
The Journal, Cognitive Science, began publication in 1976, and is now published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Executive Editor is currently Richard P. Cooper of Birkbeck, University of London, and there are 18 Associate Editors and a 30-member editorial board. It serves as the premier outlet for research reports that intersect two or more disciplines. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society. The Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society voted in late 2006 to found a new journal, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). The Editor in Chief is Wayne Gray, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The journal seeks to fill a niche not occupied by Cognitive Science Journal or other cognitive science journals. Membership in the Society includes a subscription to Cognitive Science and TopiCS. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society.
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CogSci 2025

The 47th 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.
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<br>[**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)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/DeArmond-CogSci2022-program-v113-final.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. 





Category learning is a fundamental skill across modalities. Previous studies have investigated how children learn categories, primarily focusing on a single modality within a study. As a result, it is not well understood how the same children approach category learning tasks across modalities. In this study, we investigate 7–12-year-old children’s ability to learn rule-based or information-integration categories in the auditory and visual modalities. Our results indicate that children learn and generalize their knowledge better for visual than auditory categories, regardless of category type, and for rule-based than information-integration categories, regardless of modality. Even so, learning was strongly correlated across all tasks. Children overwhelmingly used unidimensional rule-based strategies to learn, regardless of whether it was optimal for the task. These results demonstrate that there are individual differences in children’s ability to learn perceptual categories across modalities and suggest that category learning in children is both category- and modality-general.

Auditory and visual category learning in children

Semantic extension plays a key role in language change and grammaticalisation. Here we use a dyadic interaction paradigm to study semantic extension of novel labels in controlled circumstances. We ask whether participants will be able to (i) use highly accessible associations in the perceptual environment (colour-shape associations) to converge on a meaning for the novel labels, and (ii) extend these meanings to apply to both concrete targets (objects) and abstract targets (emotions). Further, given the argument that both metonymy and metaphor are important drivers of language change, we investigate whether participants will be able to draw on relations of contiguity (‘metonymic’ associations, e.g. colour-shape or object-colour) and relations of similarity (‘metaphorical’ associations, e.g. emotion-colour) to extend the meaning of labels.

An experimental study of semantic extension in a novel communication system

How do humans generalise to make better decisions? Previous work has investigated this question using reward-guided decision-making tasks with low-dimensional and artificial stimuli. In this paper, we extend this work by presenting participants with a naturalistic decision-making task, in which options were images of real-world objects and the underlying reward function was based on one of their latent dimensions. Even though participants received no explicit instruction about object features, they quickly learned to do the task and generalised to unseen objects. To understand how they accomplished this, we tested a range of computational models and found that human behaviour is overall best explained by a linear model but that participants' strategies changed during the experiment. Lastly, we showed that combining pixel-based representations extracted from convolutional neural networks with the original latent dimensions further improved our models. Taken together, our study offers new insights into human decision making under naturalistic settings.

Decision-Making with Naturalistic Options

The introduction of large-scale data sets in psychology allows for more robust accounts of various cognitive mechanisms, one of which is human learning. However, these data sets provide participants with complete autonomy over their own participation in the task, and therefore require precisely studying the factors influencing dropout alongside learning. In this work, we present such a data set where 1,234,844 participants play 10,874,547 games of a challenging variant of tic-tac-toe. We establish that there is a correlation between task performance and total experience, and independently analyze participants’ dropout behavior and learning trajectories. We find evidence for stopping patterns as a function of playing strength and investigate the processes underlying playing strength increases with experience using a set of metrics derived from a planning model. Finally, we develop a joint model to account for both dropout and learning functions which replicates our empirical findings.

A joint analysis of dropout and learning functions in human decision-making with massive online data

Joint pick and place tasks occur in many interpersonal scenarios, such as when two people pick up and pass dishes. Previous studies have demonstrated that low-dimensional models can accurately capture the dynamics of pick and place motor behaviors in a controlled 2D environment. The current study models the dynamics of pick-up and pass decisions within a less restrictive virtual reality mediated 3D joint pick and place task. Findings indicate that reach-normalized distance measures, between participants and objects/targets, could accurately predict pick-up and pass decisions. Findings also reveal that participants took longer to pick-up objects where division of labor boundaries were less obvious and tended to pass in locations maximizing the dyad’s efficiency. This study supports the notion that individuals are more likely to engage in interpersonal behavior when a task goal is perceived as difficult or unattainable (i.e., not afforded). Implications of findings for human-artificial agent interactions are discussed.

I Know Your Next Move: Action Decisions in Dyadic Pick and Place Tasks

There is a pressing need to inform the public and drive personal and political action to mitigate climate change. Recent theorizing suggests that people’s intuitive theories may be key levers for affecting attitude and behavior change (Weisman & Markman, 2017). We asked 400 participants to estimate the probability of different future events related to climate change. Our findings indicate that people hold coherent theories of climate change, that these theories were predictive of policy positions, and that they varied across individuals and across partisan groups. In particular, political independents and Republicans’s causal models underestimated the impacts of climate change. We also examined an educational intervention that explains a key mechanism of climate change (Ranney & Clark, 2016). Unfortunately, while the intervention increased mechanistic knowledge, it did not affect participants’ beliefs about climate outcomes. Nevertheless, the coherence of participants’ intuitive theories gives hope that other educational interventions could have meaningful and systematic effects on policy attitudes and political behaviors.

Understanding intuitive theories of climate change

Enabling efficient communication in artificial agents brings
us closer to machines that can cooperate with each other and
with human partners. Hand-engineered approaches have substantial limitations, leading to increased interest in methods for communication to emerge autonomously between artificial agents. Most of the research in the field explores unsituated communication in one-step referential tasks. The tasks are not temporally interactive and lack time pressures typically present in natural communication and language learning. In
these settings, agents can successfully learn what to communicate but not when or whether to communicate. Here, we extend the literature by assessing emergence of communication between reinforcement learning agents in a temporally interactive, cooperative task of navigating a gridworld environment. We show that, through multi-step interactions, agents develop just-in-time messaging protocols that enable them to
successfully solve the task. With memory—which provides
flexibility around message timing—agent pairs converge to a
look-ahead communication protocol, finding an optimal solution to the task more quickly than without memory. Lastly, we explore situated communication, enabling the acting agent to choose when and whether to communicate. With the opportunity cost of forgoing an action to communicate, the acting agent learns to solicit information sparingly, in line with the Gricean Maxim of quantity. Our results point towards the
importance of studying language emergence through situated
communication in multi-step interactions.

Towards Situated Communication in Multi-Step Interactions: Time is a Key Pressure in Communication Emergence

From classrooms to dinner parties, many of our everyday conversations take place in larger groups where speakers address multiple listeners at once. Such multiparty settings raise a number of challenges for classical theories of communication, which largely focus on dyadic interactions. In this study, we investigated how speakers adapt their referring expressions over time as a function of the feedback they receive from multiple parties. We collected a large corpus of multiparty repeated reference games (98 games, 390 participants, 116K words) where speakers designed referring expressions for groups of 1 to 5 listeners. Larger groups tended to use more words total and to introduce more new words; nonetheless, most groups were able to converge to more efficient conventions regardless of the number of listeners.

Two's company but six is a crowd: emergence of conventions in multiparty communication games

Language is a unique hallmark of humans, it is both learned and symbolic, which poses the problem of emergence: if neither form nor meaning is known, how can individuals communicate in the first place? The current study replicates work that investigates the emergence of signal forms and meanings and explores how Personal Need for Structure (PNS) of interacting partners can aid or hinder the emergence of communicative systems. We include an existing measure of personal need for structure to investigate its relationship with the emergence of such systems while participants play the embodied communication game (ECG). Similar to the original study, our work shows that a bootstrapping process and sufficient common ground are integral to the recognition of signalhood. Moreover, this process appears to be more successful for individuals who respond differently to a lack of structure as compared to their interaction partner. Contrary to what is usually assumed, our results indicate that not only shared expectations and biases seem to matter in communicative tasks, but that diversity in biases of communication partners can also be beneficial for the emergence of new communication systems.

Need for Structure and the Emergence of Communication

The literature suggests several hypotheses explaining adaptive vs. maladaptive character of task unrelated thoughts (TUT). However, it is still not clear what particular features can differentiate adaptive TUT from its maladaptive form. The main aim of the present study was to test the content and the context regulation hypothesis using daily sampling, that is to verify how TUT and task features are linked to momentary mood. 214 participants assessed their trait TUT through self-reported questionnaires and underwent a 7-day ecological momentary assessment of mood, TUT, and task characteristics measured 7 times by day. The results suggest that TUT particular features (i.e. lack of control, delay from the present moment, valence) are linked to both, lower mood valence and higher anxiety. Moreover control over the thoughts moderates the link between task characteristic (effort required by the task) and participants’ mood. Thus, from the clinical perspective, it seems more justified to take into account the particular TUT features instead of distinguishing specific TUT type (e.g. mind-wandering or rumination).

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