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A recent proposal argued a structure like X1’s-X2 is recursive if X1 and X2 are substitutable as the head; the head requirement avoids wrong generalizations like ‘*dogs chase cats chase rats’ since NP is not the head of NP1-V-NP2 although the NPs can be substitutable. To test the role of headedness in the distributional learning of recursion, we exposed 50 adults to one of two artificial languages: both allowed A1-B-A2 strings, with A1 and A2 substitutable; but the head was A2 in one language and B in the other. Non-head elements were optional, so the two languages allowed different linear strings. In the rating test, at predicted, participants from both conditions learned the head; and while there was no difference for ABA strings between conditions, suggesting they all learned linear substitutability, participants exposed to head substitutability (A-head) were more willing to allow recursion (ABABA) with both attested and unattested words.

CogSci 2023

Distributional learning of recursive structures: The role of the structural representation

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

**Your Program Chairs,**
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**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


CogSci 2021

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.

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

The development of large language models (LLMs) enables the investigation of cognitive phenomena at an unprecedented scale. We applied LLM-derived measures on large narrative datasets to characterize the structure and dynamics of memory retrieval. Specifically, we found that autobiographical narratives flow less linearly from sentence to sentence than biographical narratives. Furthermore, the treatment of topics within biographies tends to be more coherent and are also written at a higher level of complexity than autobiographies. In summary, the narrative flow differences suggest that when authors rely on their own memory, retrieval proceeds in a less organized manner likely reflecting spontaneous cueing of associated memories. Our results demonstrate the utility of applying LLMs to narrative text to study cognitive phenomena.

Narrative flow quantification of autobiographies reveals signatures of memory retrieval

When choosing how to describe what happened, we have a number of causal verbs at our disposal. In this paper, we develop a model-theoretic formal semantics for nine causal verbs that span the categories of CAUSE, ENABLE, and PREVENT. Our model uses structural causal models (SCMs) to represent participants' mental construction of a scene when assessing the correctness of causal expressions within the presented context. Furthermore, SCMs enable us to model events relating both the physical world as well as agents' mental states. In experimental evaluations, we find that the proposed semantics exhibits a closer alignment with human evaluations in comparison to prior accounts of the verb families.

A Semantics for Causing, Enabling, and Preventing Verbs Grounded in Structural Causal Models

We present a computational (LSTM) model that learns to produce English (3sg and -bare) verb inflection when trained on English child-directed speech (CDS). The model is trained on input containing morphemized verbs and learns to predict the next word given a preceding sequence of words. The model produces the type of error (-bare for -3s) shown by English-learning children while avoiding errors that children do not often make (-3s for -bare). The model also shows the same type of sensitivity to input statistics that has been reported in English-learning children. Finally, we manipulated the length of the sequences the model is trained on, and show that this results in the delayed acquisition of -3sg forms that is characteristic of English-learning children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Taken together these results suggest that input-driven learning is a major determinant of both typical and impaired acquisition of English verb inflection.

Simulating children’s verb inflection errors in English using an LSTM language model

A central challenge of cross-situational word learning is retaining word-referent mappings across exposures. We evaluate Memory-Bound Pursuit (MBP), a hypothesis-testing model of cross-situational word-learning which aims to account for learners’ memory constraints via a single parameter targeting the number of words that can be learned concurrently. Here, we show that by varying this parameter with age, MBP can capture both children’s and adults’ cross-situational word-learning success under varying levels of ambiguity. We also present new experimental findings supporting novel predictions made by MBP about the retention of word-referent mappings across intervening exposures. These findings suggest that MBP provides a strong baseline model of cross-situational word learning, capturing both developmental trends and experimental evidence of memory limitations for word learning.

Memory as a computational constraint in cross-situational word learning

The human lexicon expresses a wide array of objects with a limited set of named categories. Previous work has suggested that semantic categories are structured compactly to enable informative communication. Informativeness is typically quantified with respect to the entirety of a semantic domain and not at the level of individual words. We develop a measure of name informativeness in an information-theoretic framework grounded in visual object representations derived from natural images. We use computer vision models to characterize informativeness of individual names with respect to large-scale data in a naturalistic setting. We show that our informativeness measure predicts degrees of specificity in lexical categories more precisely than alternative measures based on entropy and frequency. We also show that name informativeness jointly captures within-category similarity and distinctiveness across categories. Our analyses suggest how the variability of names in the broad lexicon may be understood through the lens of information theory.

Quantifying informativeness of names in visual space

Computational models of morphology acquisition have played a central role in debates over the nature of morphological representations. Recent advances in natural language processing have renewed these debates with the advent of powerful artificial neural network architectures of morphological inflection. However, the actual suitability of these advanced neural models as models of human morphology acquisition remains uncertain. We argue that much of this confusion stems from inconsistent methods of training and evaluation. In this work, we demonstrate that more careful data set creation and an evaluation combining quantitative analysis and comparison with human development will put the evaluation of neural models on firmer ground.

Re-Evaluating the Evaluation of Neural Morphological Inflection Models

This study examines the reliability and validity of using two types of crowd-sourced judgments to collect lexical diversity scores. Scaled and pairwise comparison approaches were used to collect data from non-expert Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. The reliability of the lexical diversity ratings for the crowd-sourced raters was assessed along with those from trained raters using a variety of reliability statistics. The validity of the ratings was examined by 1) comparing crowd-sourced and trained ratings, 2) comparing crowd-sourced and trained ratings to ratings of language proficiency, and 3) by using an objective measure of lexical diversity to predict the crowd-sourced and trained ratings. The results indicate that scaled crowd-sourced ratings showed strong reliability in terms of text and rater strata and showed fewer misfitted texts than the trained raters. The scaled crowd-sourced ratings were also strongly predicted by lexical diversity features derived from the texts themselves.

Crowd-Sourcing Human Ratings of Linguistic Production

Words that regularly fill the same sentential slots are said to be paradigmatically related. Paradigmatic relations may be retained through a direct association or a latent representation at encoding, or by reinstating context during retrieval. We paired proper names by embedding them into two instances of the same sentence frame, each in a separate list, yielding blocks of two study-cloze sessions. The pairing between proper names was fixed across twelve blocks. In the static condition, the same sentence frames were used across blocks, while in the dynamic condition sentence frames changed for each block. Interference should accrue in both conditions if paradigmatic relations are based on a direct association or overlap in a latent representation, however, if paradigmatic relations are mediated by retrieved context then changing the sentence frame should release interference. Our results are consistent with a context-mediation account of paradigmatic relations.

Paradigmatic formation through context-mediation

What makes some sentences more memorable than others? In this work, we build on past work in image and word memorability and conduct a large-scale sentence memorability experiment with responses from 500 participants for 2,500 target sentences. We find that sentences vary in their intrinsic memorability. We predict the memorability of sentences from a variety of word- and sentence-level features, including representations from artificial large language models and the information-theoretic measure of surprisal. We find that the best predictor of sentence memorability is the presence of individually memorable words, but that in the absence of such words, sentence-level features predict sentence memorability. This suggests that otherwise forgettable words can together create memorable compositional meanings that remain in memory.

Context-sensitive features predict sentence memorability in the absence of memorable words

The relevance of Broca's area to language grammar processing is well established. Its relevance to implicitly learned non-linguistic sequential rules has also been demonstrated. Previous work by our lab has shown this is true even if subjects are unaware they are being trained on, and tested for, sensitivity to these rules. We extend this work to show that the degree of differential activation in Broca's area for implicitly learned grammatical vs. ungrammatical sequences is correlated across subjects with their behavioral evidence of their degree of learning of these rules as assessed by reaction time differences. Broca's is among the three regions showing the highest association with degree of learning. This finding further underscores the relevance of Broca's for non-linguistic rule learning, and suggests that the original function of this area in our pre-human ancestors may have been the implicit learning of any kind of sequential patterns in the environment.

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Narrative flow quantification of autobiographies reveals signatures of memory retrieval

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Distributional learning of recursive structures