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Rules undoubtedly guide our moral lives. Simple moral rules prohibit lying, cheating, and stealing, for instance. But the moral mind is more flexible than a theory based only on rule-adherence can account for. In this paper, we look at one particular kind of flexibility: the ability to figure out when it is okay to break a moral rule. We elicit judgments of the moral acceptability of breaking a simple rule: it&#39;s wrong to cut in line. We created a video game environment in which agents attempt to gather water -- and sometimes must stand in line behind others to do so. Subjects watch clips of the game being played and make judgments of the moral acceptability of cutting in line across a wide range of spatio-temporally varied and dynamic scenarios. Our data suggests that subjects make judgments by using a generative understanding of the underlying function of the rule about waiting in line. We further show that our data cannot be accounted for by either 1) simple rule adherence or 2) utility maximization.

CogSci 2022

Flexibility in Moral Cognition: When is it okay to break the rules?

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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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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.

Rules undoubtedly guide our moral lives. Simple moral rules prohibit lying, cheating, and stealing, for instance. But the moral mind is more flexible than a theory based only on rule-adherence can account for. In this paper, we look at one particular kind of flexibility: the ability to figure out when it is okay to break a moral rule. We elicit judgments of the moral acceptability of breaking a simple rule: it's wrong to cut in line. We created a video game environment in which agents attempt to gather water -- and sometimes must stand in line behind others to do so. Subjects watch clips of the game being played and make judgments of the moral acceptability of cutting in line across a wide range of spatio-temporally varied and dynamic scenarios. Our data suggests that subjects make judgments by using a generative understanding of the underlying function of the rule about waiting in line. We further show that our data cannot be accounted for by either 1) simple rule adherence or 2) utility maximization.

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.
 
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Beyond seemingly lower-level features such as color and motion, visual perception also recovers properties that are more commonly associated with higher-level thought — as when an upwardly accelerating object is seen as self-propelled, and resisting the force of gravity. Past work has explored how speed changes drive the perception of physical forces, but might the reverse also be true? Does seeing a speed change as resisting the force of gravity make us more likely to notice it in the first place? In four experiments, observers were more sensitive to objects’ accelerations when they moved upward (i.e. when those accelerations were opposite to gravity), and they were more sensitive to objects’ decelerations when they moved downward (i.e. when those decelerations appeared as ‘braking’ against gravity). We conclude that the perception of physical forces is not merely an outcome of visual processing, but also determines the perception of other, seemingly lower-level, features of how objects move.

May the Force be against you: Better sensitivity to speed changes opposite to gravity

According to the embodied cognition view, retrieving the meaning of action-related language requires the participation of sensorimotor processes. In consequence, an increasing number of neurostimulation (TMS and tDCS) studies have tried to test this idea. In the present study, we aim to evaluate the evidential value of this body of research (N = 43) by means of p-curve analyses. Our results suggest that the published studies so far do not yet allow to establish if they explore real effects beyond a reasonable doubt. We also found that these studies are quite underpowered (estimated power < 30%), which suggests that a large percentage of these findings are, in fact, false-positive results. In sum, our study suggests that the results derived from brain stimulation studies of embodied semantics are not as reliable as would be desirable. We give some recommendations that will be important for future research on this topic.

Grounding meaning in the motor system: A p-curve analysis of the TMS and tDCS evidence

Using space to think about time appears to be a human universal, but the specifics of people’s space-time mappings vary across individuals and groups. What determines how people spatialize time in their minds? Here we hypothesized that motor experience contributes to individuals’ space-time mappings, independent of linguistic and cultural factors. Many everyday motor actions require using the hands in a particular sequence (e.g., positioning a nail with the nondominant hand before swinging the hammer with the dominant hand), establishing a correlation between space (left hand, right hand) and time (earlier action, later action) that reverses with handedness. These action sequences reinforce Westerners’ typical left-to-right mental timeline for right-handers, but contradict this timeline for left-handers. Accordingly, we find that right-handers associate leftward space with earlier times and rightward space with later times more strongly than left-handers, for whom cultural and bodily experiences present contrasting relationships between space and time.

The le hand of time: Roles of cultural and bodily experience in constructing the mental timeline

The current work tests the hypothesis that the island status of clausal adjuncts, as determined by judgments on wh-questions, are predicted by the degree of “backgroundedness” of the adjuncts, as determined by a separate negation task. Results of two experiments support the hypothesis that acceptability of extraction from adjuncts in wh-questions is inversely correlated with the degree to which the adjunct is backgrounded in discourse. Taken together, results show that temporal clausal adjuncts (headed by before, after, while) are stronger islands than adjuncts that are causal (here, headed by to or by). This demonstrates that adjuncts differ in degree of island status, depending on their meaning, despite parallel syntactic structure.

Backgroundedness Predicts Island Status of Non-finite Adjuncts in English

Resolving overloading in communication requires attention to context. Previous research has found that the mutual assumption of cooperation during communication can act as a powerful constraint, allowing successful resolution under ambiguity. In this study, we investigate two specific types of cooperative context used in a communicative task which arise from different sources: beliefs and actions. In belief-driven communication, signals are interpreted in context of what else a speaker could have said about the world. Here communicators assume that the speaker aims to change the listener's beliefs by providing the most straightforward signal. In action-driven communication, signals are considered in terms of what a speaker can reasonably ask others to do. Signaling can be sensitive to utility considerations of acting and interacting in the physical world. Through a communication game, we tested how listeners would interpret an ambiguous signal using belief-driven or action-driven strategies. We find that while no one strategy is dominant overall, individuals are highly consistent in which strategy they employ when forced to decide.

No Such Thing as the Average Listener: Belief-driven versus Action-driven Strategies in Signaling

While widely used in psycholinguistics, the linking hypothesis for eye movements in the visual world paradigm is still poorly understood. Recent work on linking hypotheses for referential tasks in particular has found mixed support for the 'Referential Belief Link': that the proportion of looks to a referent in a time window reflects participants' degree of belief that the referent is the intended target in that time window. Here we test the hypothesis that participants' expectations for the utterances observed in an experiment modulate the extent to which the Referential Belief Link holds. This hypothesis is motivated by a simple idea: when utterances are unexpected, listeners engage in additional reasoning to make sense of the observed signal. In a re-analysis of a previous eye movement and incremental decision task dataset, in conjunction with two novel production experiments, we find that the more surprising an observed utterance is, the smaller the correlation between explicit and implicit beliefs is. We discuss the importance of participants' production expectations in research using the visual world paradigm.

The role of production expectations in visual world paradigm linking hypotheses

Source-goal events involve an object moving from the Source to the Goal. In this work, we focus on the representation of the object, which has received relatively less attention in the study of Source-goal events. Specifically, this study aims to investigate the mapping between language and mental representations of object locations in transfer-of-possession events (e.g. throwing, giving). We investigate two different grammatical factors that may influence the representation of object location in transfer-of-possession events: (a) grammatical aspect (e.g. threw vs. was throwing) and (b) verb semantics (guaranteed transfer, e.g. give vs. no guaranteed transfer, e.g. throw). We conducted a visual-world eye-tracking study using a novel webcam-based eye-tracking paradigm (Webgazer; Papoutsaki et al., 2016) to investigate how grammatical aspect and verb semantics in the linguistic input guide the real-time and final representations of object locations. We show that grammatical cues guide the real-time and final representations of object locations.

Mapping language onto mental representations of object locations in transfer-of-possession events: A visual-world study using webcam-based eye-tracking

People have a remarkable ability to remain steadfast in their beliefs in the face of large-scale disagreement. This has important consequences (e.g., societal polarization), yet its psychological underpinnings are poorly understood. In this paper, we answer foundational questions regarding belief persistence, from its prevalence to variability. Across two Experiments (N = 356, N = 354), we find that participants are aware of societal disagreement about controversial issues, yet overwhelmingly (~85%) do not question their views if asked to reflect on this disagreement. Both studies provide evidence that explanations for persistence vary across domains, with epistemic and meta-epistemic explanations among the most prevalent.

Mechanisms of Belief Persistence in the Face of Societal Disagreement

A number of findings suggest that people’s expectations about the future are unrealistically optimistic (e.g. Sharot et al., 2011). This bias is thought to result from the “motivational modulation” of evidence, driven by the desire to feel positively about one’s own future (Sharot, 2011). However, evaluating “bias” in belief revision requires careful comparison against a rational standard, and recent arguments and findings (Shah et al., 2016) give reason to doubt much of the evidence for optimism bias. Descriptive Bayesian models allow for a direct comparison of human belief updating against the Bayesian rational standard (Tauber et al., 2017). Here, these analyses indicate widespread “conservatism,” or weaker-than-rational belief revision. However, in contrast to the widely-reported “optimism bias,” participants more commonly displayed pessimism than optimism in their belief revision. Both effects were marked by significant heterogeneity, with a sizable fraction of participants engaging in largely rational updating.

A descriptive Bayesian account of optimism in belief revision

Numerous psychological findings have shown that mere exposure to ideas makes those ideas seem more true, a finding commonly referred to as the “illusory truth” effect (e.g. Hasheret al., 1977). In the presence of pervasive misinformation, this basic feature of cognition may undermine the functioning of a democratic society (Pennycook et al., 2018). However, genuine beliefs do not only produce judgments of truth, they also imply other beliefs and drive decision-making. Here, we sought to examine whether mere exposure to statements produces genuine beliefs by examining whether people draw inferences from statements after mere exposure. Surprisingly, and in contrast to familiarity-based accounts of the illusory truth effect (e.g. Dechene et al., 2010), we found that exposure to “premise” statements affected participants’ truth ratings for novel "implied" statements. This “illusory implication” effect suggests that exposure to false statements has further-reaching impacts than previously thought and calls for a new mechanistic account of these effects.

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May the Force be against you: Better sensitivity to speed changes opposite to gravity

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