United States

We propose a novel approach that utilizes virtual reality (VR) and simulation environments to quantify the impact of visual impairments (VIs) on daily tasks, e.g., to what extent does glaucoma slow people down in wiping a table or chopping vegetables? We utilize clinical data from patients to develop visual field models, allowing VR to mimic the visual perception of VI patients as if it is seen through their eyes. Additionally, we leverage BEHAVIOR, the state-of-the-art simulation environment, to recreate a household environment for six daily activities. By measuring the disparity between the subjects&#39; performance with and without VI, we can accurately quantify the impact of VIs. We further quantify the effects of VIs on body and eye movements, and model how movement strategies affect task performance under the influence of VIs. We hope our results can provide valuable insights into the challenges faced by individuals with VIs.

CogSci 2023

Quantifying the Effect of Visual Impairments on Daily Activities in Virtual, Interactive Environments

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

We propose a novel approach that utilizes virtual reality (VR) and simulation environments to quantify the impact of visual impairments (VIs) on daily tasks, e.g., to what extent does glaucoma slow people down in wiping a table or chopping vegetables? We utilize clinical data from patients to develop visual field models, allowing VR to mimic the visual perception of VI patients as if it is seen through their eyes. Additionally, we leverage BEHAVIOR, the state-of-the-art simulation environment, to recreate a household environment for six daily activities. By measuring the disparity between the subjects' performance with and without VI, we can accurately quantify the impact of VIs. We further quantify the effects of VIs on body and eye movements, and model how movement strategies affect task performance under the influence of VIs. We hope our results can provide valuable insights into the challenges faced by individuals with VIs.

poster

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

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<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
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#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

When reading a text, readers not only recognise words and retrieve their meanings as they construct a mental representation of the text, but they also process the physical location of the text, including the position of key information. This study investigates how different presentation formats (prints vs. digital) influence the ability to locate information in texts, and if this is influenced by different types of text, and age. Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM; Baayen, 2008) starting with maximal random effects structure (Barr et al., 2013) are employed for analysis. Preliminary analyses (n=74 out of 120 pre-registered) indicate that participants in the print condition outperformed their peers in the digital condition on the measure of location of information, but no difference was found between different text types. Additionally, results suggest that spatial working memory is positively related to the ability to locate information in texts.

Reading Print vs. on Screen: How Do Format and Text Type Influence Our Ability To Locate Information in Text?

Previous eye-movement research on reading and comprehension typically reports better performance in L1 reading as compared to L2. However, the same may not be true in cases where knowing and reading a second language is necessary for acquiring education. To explore this issue, we asked 10 normal participants to read a text in Hindi (L1) and English (L2) in a naturalistic reading paradigm while their eye-movements were being recorded. The aim of the study was to test efficiency of reading in both the languages and compare them. Results revealed reading advantage for L2 for all eye-movement dependent variables (average and trial level fixation counts, gaze duration and run counts). The results were also correlated with independent variables like frequency (zipf) and word complexity score (length) in both languages.

Outcome of Globalization: Evidence for a Second Language Advantage in Reading and Comprehension from An Eye Tracking Study

Research in cognitive development suggests that very early in development children, even infants, may reason about social interactions between individuals that are likely to be relevant for representing leadership (e.g., Stavans & Baillargeon, 2019). In addition, some children develop as leaders (e.g., Kinkead-Clark, 2019; Li et al, 2007), and the specific behaviors they demonstrate are consistent with leadership theories (e.g., Direction, Alignment, and Commitment; Drath et al., 2008). The current study tests whether children represent leadership in terms of Direction, Alignment, and Commitment to shed light on leadership representations in cognitive development. When presented with a ‘sample’ event portraying leadership (or not) followed by another pair of events (only one portraying leadership), 10-13 year olds (N = 24) selected the correct match event significantly above chance; M= 68.50, SE = 4.88, t(23) = 13.91, p < .001. The findings have implications for cognitive theories by clarifying the nature of leadership representations.

Children’s Representations of Events: Categorizing Leadership

Research in cognition and social psychology of organizations have explored perception of leadership. Yet, these investigations remain unconnected. The current study puts forth an approach to studying leadership cognition by 1) using leadership theory to define leadership behavior in an experimental context (in terms of Direction, Alignment, Commitment), and 2) using the Match-to-Sample task to test leadership categorization in adults. When presented with a ‘sample’ event portraying servant leadership followed by another pair of events (only one portraying servant leadership and the other portraying either: task leadership, social interaction, and virtuous interactions), adults (N = 330) selected the correct match event significantly above chance; M=.57 (SE = .01), t(329) = 8.00, p < .001. The findings have implications for cognitive theories by clarifying the nature of leadership representations, as well as for social organizational psychology by introducing a cognitive, non self-report measure of leadership understanding.

Adults’ Event Representations: Categorizing Servant Leadership

How and why do people share opinions online? In research conducted offline, the social identity of the audience is a key factor: whether they are composed of one’s ingroup or outgroup affects what people share and why. Do people behave similarly and for similar reasons online? To test this, we put participants (N = 326) in imaginary forums belonging to their ingroup and outgroup. In each, people selected statements to share, along with reasons for doing so. The results showed a high degree of heterogeneity; people shared nearly all kinds of statements with both audiences, for a variety of reasons. However, there were also consistent patterns. Identity expression was the most common reason for sharing to both audiences, but this led to different things being shared to each. To the ingroup, people preferred to share statements expressing ingroup beliefs, while to the outgroup, they preferred statements expressing universal beliefs.

Online communication to the ingroup and the outgroup: the role of identity in the “what” and “why” of information sharing

Interpersonal coordination is a key determinant of successful social interaction but is disrupted for people who experience social anxiety. Effective coordination rests on individuals directing their attention toward others, an effect well-documented in previous literature. Yet, little research has considered the concurrent behaviour of interaction partners. Using a novel virtual reality task, we investigated how partner gaze (i.e., direct vs. averted) influenced the emergence of coordination. The results revealed two novel effects: (i) spontaneous coordination was diminished in the averted (cf. direct) gaze condition; (ii) spontaneous coordination was positively related to symptoms of social anxiety, but only when partner gaze was averted. This latter finding contrasts the extant literature and points to a boundary condition of the social anxiety-coordination association (i.e., social distance). More broadly, this work provides further evidence that emergent patterns of interpersonal coordination fluctuate as a function of changes in social context and the behaviour of others.

Investigating the Influence of Partner Gaze on the Relationship Between Interpersonal Coordination and Social Anxiety

This study investigated the impact of refutative elements in others’ comments on accepting fallacious claims about food nutrition. Four types of comments were used, two of which included refutative elements (challenging evidence and deductive process). A multiple regression analysis was conducted with 506 participants’ agreement with the fallacious claim as the dependent variable and the type of comment and their agreement before exposure to the comments as independent variables. The study also considered individual differences such as media literacy, information literacy, cognitive reflection, and interest in and familiarity with the topic. The results showed that presenting comments that challenged the deductive process significantly decreased agreement when participants had higher agreement before exposure. Further analysis of participants with high initial agreement revealed significant effects of all three comment types. A supplemental survey (n=182) suggested that the perceived negativity and usefulness of the comments influenced the participants' agreement.

The Effects of Refutative Elements in Others’ Comments on Accepting Health-Related Fallacious Claims

Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing different goals or objectives, indiscriminate imitation is unlikely to be an effective strategy---the imitator must instead determine who is most useful to copy. There are likely many factors that play into these judgements, depending on context and availability of information. Here we investigate the hypothesis that these decisions involve inferences about other agents' reward functions. We suggest that people preferentially imitate the behavior of others they deem to have similar reward functions to their own. We further argue that these inferences can be made on the basis of very spare or indirect data, by leveraging an inductive bias toward positing the existence of different groups or types of people with similar reward functions, allowing learners to select imitation targets without direct evidence of alignment.

Selective imitation on the basis of reward function similarity

The human brain can quickly organise visually perceived objects into categories. Although previous research has focussed on object and category representations in the brain, it is still unclear how one category of ecological importance, food, is represented in the brain. Here, we used time-resolved multivariate analyses of electroencephalography data to investigate the time-course of food representations in the brain. Our results show that the brain distinguishes between food and non-food items from approximately 84 ms onwards. The neural signal also contained information about the naturalness, the level of transformation, as well as the perceived caloric content of food. In addition, the recorded brain activity predicted the behavioural responses of different groups of participants who participated in one of two tasks: a naturalness food categorisation task and an odd-item-out task on 3 presented food items. Together, our results contribute to our understanding of how the human brain processes visually presented food.

The representational dynamics of food in the human brain

From learning to play video games to using novel tools, humans are able to acquire a variety of complex mappings between their actions and arbitrary outcomes. In addition, once they have learned such mappings, they often have to use them sequentially to achieve goals, i.e., planning. In this work we study how the learning of a novel mapping interacts with planning in the context of grid navigation. In order to do so, we developed a computer-based game where subjects have to move a cursor from start to target locations using the keys of their keyboard. Importantly, to more closely resemble the complexity of the mappings that people acquire in their lives, the cursor movement was determined by a non-trivial rule inspired by the movement of the piece of chess known as the Knight. In Experiment 1, we show that participants were able to improve their performance in our task, though not arriving optimally to the targets in the majority of trials. Additionally, we proposed two computational models where the mapping-learning and planning interaction occurs in the form of an action value computation, and then evaluated their fit to our data. Finally, in Experiment 2, we showed that exposing participants to the mapping component of the task without having to plan, provides a performance improvement when exposed to the full task later. Crucially, this improvement does not occur if subjects are exposed to the planning component of the task prior to doing it fully.


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Reading Print vs. on Screen: How Do Format and Text Type Influence Our Ability To Locate Information in Text?

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