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One possibility that may facilitate learning difficult tasks is building a specific curriculum, i.e., to start with simpler tasks and continue with increasing task difficulty. While such curriculum learning has long been considered and investigated in educational settings, little research has been conducted on curriculum learning in well-controlled experimental settings. To fill this gap, we investigated curriculum learning in a perceptual decision-making task. Across two experiments, we tested whether different training conditions (ascending difficulty, descending difficulty, random difficulty, easy difficulty, and difficult difficulty) affected participants&#39; performance in a subsequent testing phase. We found that participants trained on a sequence of varying difficulty (i.e., ascending difficulty, descending difficulty, and random difficulty) outperformed others from easy-only and difficult-only training. However, we found no differences during testing between the conditions with varying difficulty. These results suggest that varying the difficulty during training yields advantages when learning the random-dot-motion task.

CogSci 2023

Does a Curriculum Improve Perceptual Decision Making?

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

One possibility that may facilitate learning difficult tasks is building a specific curriculum, i.e., to start with simpler tasks and continue with increasing task difficulty. While such curriculum learning has long been considered and investigated in educational settings, little research has been conducted on curriculum learning in well-controlled experimental settings. To fill this gap, we investigated curriculum learning in a perceptual decision-making task. Across two experiments, we tested whether different training conditions (ascending difficulty, descending difficulty, random difficulty, easy difficulty, and difficult difficulty) affected participants' performance in a subsequent testing phase. We found that participants trained on a sequence of varying difficulty (i.e., ascending difficulty, descending difficulty, and random difficulty) outperformed others from easy-only and difficult-only training. However, we found no differences during testing between the conditions with varying difficulty. These results suggest that varying the difficulty during training yields advantages when learning the random-dot-motion task.

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. 
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).

Join us!

 [**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
 [**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
 

#### **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.

In classrooms and media, research results are often reported with explanations of the outcome. However, past research suggests that presenting one outcome to participants reduces surprise and increases expectation of replication (hindsight bias), and explanations may enhance these effects (explanation bias). We tested whether actual outcomes and explanations of them increased difficulty of explaining alternative outcomes, and, if so, whether it biased people towards the actual outcome. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers and introductory psychology students were divided into three groups: 1. Receiving details of four psychological studies, 2. additional receiving outcomes, 3. additionally receiving explanations of outcomes. We did not find reliable effects on difficulty of explaining alternative outcomes, and correspondingly, little evidence for hindsight or explanation biases. We speculate that this may be due to our participants' having explained alternative outcomes immediately after considering the actual outcomes.

Considering Alternative Outcomes of Research: Does Knowing the Actual Outcome Create Bias?

The establishment of international cooperative universities presents a unique challenge for educators and administrators due to cultural differences in practices around academic integrity. This is especially relevant in the context of Sino-foreign universities due to increased tolerance and decreased training concerning plagiarism in Chinese education. For many students enrolled in these universities, knowledge of academic integrity may be bound to the English language. Informed by research on the Foreign Language Effect, the present study investigated whether Mandarin-English bilingual university students (n = 106) respond differently to academic integrity dilemmas based on the language of presentation. Most interestingly, we identified a modulatory role of English proficiency with higher levels associated with a lower likelihood of plagiarism when dilemmas were presented in English. Additional findings suggest that separable dimensions of English experience interact to modulate responses to academic integrity dilemmas.

Is There a Foreign Language Effect on Academic Integrity?

Humans systematically underestimate exponential growth, which directly impacts their real-world behavior. Recent research yielded conflicting results as to the origins of this cognitive bias. In this study, we present an experiment with a short educational intervention, in which we further examine factors modulating the exponential bias in graphs. We test the hypothesis that the use of logarithmic vs. linear scales can induce misperceptions in a specific context. Moreover, we explore the effect of mathematical education by testing two groups of participants (humanities vs. formal sciences). The results confirm that when used in an inadequate context, these scales can strongly impact the interpretation of visualizations. While the log scale leads to errors in graph description, the linear scale misleads people in prediction tasks. Our educational intervention significantly reduced these difficulties, although the learning effect was greater for mathematically-skilled participants. These findings are discussed in light of a dual-process model.

The exponential growth bias in graphs: how to avoid contextual pitfalls

Past studies have suggested associations between children’s mindset and Achievement Orientation, but most research was conducted with children from Western countries. This study aims to examine how Failure and Intelligence Mindset relate to children’s Achievement Orientation across culture. An online interview was conducted with 113 Singaporean children and 122 U.S. children aged between 4 to 9, during which Achievement Orientation was measured with a hypothetical scenario, and mindset was measured with child-friendly Likert scale items adapted from previous surveys. Results showed that after controlling for age, the correlation between Intelligence Mindset and Achievement Orientation was not significant for either culture. Failure Mindset correlated with Achievement Orientation for Singaporean children but not for U.S. children. These findings suggest that Failure Mindset maybe especially important in Asian culture, where a failure-is-motivating mindset can encourage children to face challenging tasks.

Failure Mindset is Associated with Achievement Orientation Among Singaporean Children

Resources and examples of building equity into the design of rigorous education studies of cognitive interventions is lacking. Here we describe an early-stage attempt to build equity into a large-scale randomized trial of a cognitive intervention - i.e., interleaved practice - for middle-school mathematics learning. Our approach is informed by WestEd's Anti-Racist Evaluation Strategies (WestEd, 2021) which is informed by literature on equitable research and evaluation. It incorporates three overarching themes: self-reflection and learning, equitable partnerships, and understanding context. Our approach incorporates the themes into two major strands of equitable research practices: (1) engaging the study team in learning and self-reflection around issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion and (2) Engaging relevant parties in the research processes. Though early stage in the project, we will report both successes and challenges of these efforts and aim to foster discussion about how to best incorporate equity-based approaches in cognitive science research.


Embedding Equitable Research Practices into the Rigorous Study of a Cognitive Learning Intervention

In the U.S., Heritage language learners (HLLs) are bilinguals who grew up in homes where a non-English language was spoken but received English instruction from school. We used resting-state functional connectivity analysis to examine the differences in the reading networks of HLL and matched bilingual children who are biliterate in both languages (bilingual-biliterates). Compared to bilingual-biliterates, HLLs built a wider and more distributed reading network. This more distributed network included connections to regions known to be involved in motor control, verbal memory, speech production, and language control. Moreover, even though no significant difference in English reading was found, HLLs continued to show differentiated intrinsic connectivity associated with English reading scores. For HLLs only, better English reading scores were related to stronger functional connectivity between reading and language control areas. This suggests that HLLs are more likely to recruit brain regions involved in language control to achieve advanced English word reading.

Speaking a Language is Not Enough! Distinct Neurobiological Reading Networks Support Heritage Language and Bilingual-Biliterate Children’s Reading

Textbooks often consist not only of textual information but also of supplementary information. In this study, we investigated whether the comprehension of supplementary information differs when it is placed around the text or inserted into the text. 81 university students were asked to read texts with supplementary information around the text and texts with supplementary information inserted into the text, and to answer questions related to the content. They were asked to answer questions about the content. They were also asked about their reading skills and the ease with which they could understand each text. The results showed that comprehension scores were higher when additional information was inserted into the text. In addition, only participants who think they are poor readers rated the supplementary information as easier to understand and remember when it was inserted into the text. Based on these results, the better layout of the textbook was discussed.

What is a Textbook Layout that Everyone Understands? : Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Text and Supplementary Information

Numerous cross-cultural comparative studies have claimed East Asian children’s superiority in spatial cognition and the significance of intensive Chinese character writing experience in shaping this superiority. However, the specific mechanism/pathways behind this functioning remain unclear. To fill this gap, this study focused on the spatial-orientated legibility dimension and investigated the relationship between Chinese handwriting legibility and spatial cognition with different spatial subskills (i.e., visual-motor integration, spatial visualization, and mental rotation) in the particular Chinese cultural context. A total of 249 4th graders participated in the investigation and finished the relevant measurements. The results suggested that Chinese handwriting legibility had a strong relationship with visual-motor integration, and this relationship can be generalized to spatial visualization and mental rotation, thus confirming the close relationship between Chinese handwriting and spatial cognition and specifying the mechanism/pathways behind this relationship. Interpretations for the results and implications for school practitioners are discussed.

Linguistic Pathways to Spatial Cognition: The relations between Chinese handwriting legibility and different spatial subskills

Several learning principles have emerged from cognitive science research that have direct applications for education (e.g., interleaved practice, worked examples, etc.). However, applying these principles at scale in education is complicated, as the principles fail to specify how they should be applied in different content areas, curricula, and classroom contexts. We summarize several challenges we have faced when attempting to apply and study the efficacy of cognitive learning principles in STEM educational contexts: 1) design challenges, e.g., how to enact the principle in new materials, 2) contextual/practical challenges, e.g., feasibility of implementation, scalability; 3) study-design challenges, e.g., implementation variability, data collection considerations; and 4) theory-specification, i.e., areas where principles may be underspecified for application. We aim to provide concrete suggestions and lessons learned related to translating cognitive principles, as well as spark discussion that could lead to new research and advance theory specification.

Applying cognitive learning principles to practice: Challenges in translation and large-scale study design

When learning to solve mathematical equivalence problems, students benefit from instruction with hand gesture. However, little is known about the mechanism by which gesture supports student’s learning. Since gesture is highly visual, it is possible that gesture supports learning by changing students’ visual attention during instruction. We used eye-tracking to investigate how observing gesture in instruction influences visual attention during subsequent problem-solving. Children were taught how to solve mathematical equivalence problems using video instruction with or without gesture. Children who were taught using instruction with gesture had increased attention to the blank during post-test problem solving compared to children who were taught without gesture. Children’s visual attention patterns on the blank also differed by problem features and learning outcomes. These findings suggest that gesture influences visual attention during problem-solving which may an important mechanism in gesture’s influence on children’s learning.

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Considering Alternative Outcomes of Research: Does Knowing the Actual Outcome Create Bias?

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