Netherlands

Reduced cognitive function in major depression (MDD) is often interpreted as a reduced ability to exert cognitive control. Here we used the Effort Foraging Task to test the hypothesis that reduced cognitive function may be due, in part, to decreased willingness to exert control in MDD because of increased cognitive effort &quot;costs&quot;. Contrary to our predictions, neither cognitive nor physical effort costs differed with MDD diagnosis (N MDD=52, N Comparisons=27). However, we found distinct patterns of symptom relationships for cognitive and physical effort costs. In MDD, greater anxiety symptoms were selectively associated with lower cognitive, but not physical effort cost (i.e. greater willingness to exert cognitive effort), whereas greater anhedonia and behavioral apathy symptoms were selectively associated with increased physical (but not cognitive) effort costs. These findings support the measurement of both cognitive and physical effort as decision-making function markers that may inform heterogeneity of MDD.

**Authors:**

Laura A. Bustamante: Washington University in St. Louis; Deanna Barch: Washington University in St. Louis; Johanne Solis: Rutgers University; Temitope Oshinowo: Princeton University; Ivan Grahek: Brown University; Anna B Konova: Rutgers University; Nathaniel Daw: Princeton University; Jonathan Cohen: Princeton University

CogSci 2024

Anxiety symptoms of major depression associated with increased willingness to exert cognitive, but not physical effort

### 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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#### Code of Conduct

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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.

Reduced cognitive function in major depression (MDD) is often interpreted as a reduced ability to exert cognitive control. Here we used the Effort Foraging Task to test the hypothesis that reduced cognitive function may be due, in part, to decreased willingness to exert control in MDD because of increased cognitive effort "costs". Contrary to our predictions, neither cognitive nor physical effort costs differed with MDD diagnosis (N MDD=52, N Comparisons=27). However, we found distinct patterns of symptom relationships for cognitive and physical effort costs. In MDD, greater anxiety symptoms were selectively associated with lower cognitive, but not physical effort cost (i.e. greater willingness to exert cognitive effort), whereas greater anhedonia and behavioral apathy symptoms were selectively associated with increased physical (but not cognitive) effort costs. These findings support the measurement of both cognitive and physical effort as decision-making function markers that may inform heterogeneity of MDD.

**Authors:**

Laura A. Bustamante: Washington University in St. Louis; Deanna Barch: Washington University in St. Louis; Johanne Solis: Rutgers University; Temitope Oshinowo: Princeton University; Ivan Grahek: Brown University; Anna B Konova: Rutgers University; Nathaniel Daw: Princeton University; Jonathan Cohen: Princeton University

technical paper

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was an in-person meeting held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands at the Postillion Hotel & Conference Centre.

**ON-DEMAND PROGRAM ACCESS AFTER THE CONFERENCE**<br>
Recordings of the invited program are now available. You can access them by clicking on the 'Schedule' icon on the left. Select view by week and navigate to the day and time slot of the recording you wish to view. Click on the time slot to access the recording.

Recordings available (click on each recording to view):

**Thursday, July 25**<br>
0900: [Keynote Speaker Morgan Barense on Enhancing real-world event memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/17997/lecture/99084-dynamics-between-minds-and-the-environment)<br>
1000: [Gleitman Award Winner Isabelle Dautriche on Language Foundations: Insights from acquisition, communication, cognition, and more](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18000/lecture/99085-gleitman-talk)<br>
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1700: [Rumelhart Prize Presentation Speaker Alison Gopnik on Exploit, explore, empower: Three ages and three intelligences](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18028/lecture/99161-rp1-rumelhart-prize-presentation)<br>

**Friday, July 26**<br>
0900: [C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize Keynote Speaker Kia Nobre on Focusing in memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18035/lecture/99162-hp1-c-l-de-carvalho-heineken-prize-keynote-address)<br>
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration)<br>
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1745: [Keynote Speaker Andrea E. Martin on Neural dynamics encode the structure and statistics of language](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18077/lecture/99271-neural-dynamics-encode-the-structure-and-statistics-of-language)<br>

**Saturday, July 27**<br>
0900: [Keynote Speaker Gregor Schöner on How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18083/lecture/99273-dynamics-within-the-mind)<br>
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture)<br>


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
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**The Program Book can be downloaded [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yRVp1cBqRnAbdYi4GXWV_pZeyWNsRquv/view?usp=sharing).**

#### **Letter from the President**

Welcome to the 2024 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Rotterdam! CogSci 2024 brings together a large community of cognitive scientists who have traveled here from around the world, as well as a smaller group of remote presenters. I would like to extend an especially warm welcome to our first-time CogSci meeting attendees, and hope that 
their experience inspires them to join our future meetings for many years to come.

I want to thank this year’s conference co-chairs, Larissa K Samuelson, Stefan Frank, Mariya Toneva, Allyson Mackey, and Eliot Hazeltine, for putting together an amazing series of invited talks and symposia around the theme of Dynamics of Cognition. The co-chairs also deserve credit for handling a record-breaking number of submissions and producing a truly exciting conference program 

Beyond the invited talks and symposia dedicated to this year’s conference theme, I would like to highlight the presentations and events honoring the 
Rumelhart, Elman, Gleitman and C .L . de Carvalho Heineken prize winners, including the Rumelhart reception on Thursday. As you may know, we are recording all of the invited talks and symposia, and all prize-winners’ talks, and will be making this content available after the conference. 

The Cognitive Science Society relies on the volunteer efforts of our Governing Board members who work on matters related to our membership; conference policies; diversity and inclusion, international, and outreach initiatives; prizes and much more. We welcome interest from Society members who would like to become more involved in what we do. The 
Society is deeply grateful to Rick Dale and Andrea Bender, who serve as editors of the two Society journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science respectively. We especially acknowledge our editors’ generosity in donating their stipends each year to D&I and outreach efforts. 

This year’s Annual Meeting depends critically on the support of Marischal De Armond and his team at Podium Conference Specialists: Sharon Zwack, Cendrine De Vis, Sarah-Kate Burke, and Rachel Waller worked tirelessly to secure the venue and handled a multitude of logistical and organizational issues, from arranging coffee breaks and receptions to making sure that a huge number of posters fits comfortably into the available space. Finally, and importantly, I would like to acknowledge the Cognitive Science Society Executive Officer, Erica Wojcik, for managing the complex and ever expanding sphere of our Society’s activities.

I hope you enjoy this year’s meeting and the many different opportunities to engage with the vibrant community of cognitive scientists gathered here. I also hope you get a chance to explore the great city of Rotterdam with its many attractions, museums, restaurants and scenic views. If you’d like to talk more about our Society, or simply want to say hello, please stop by!

![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/3c66d0e21fff30e204df1138ffd15173.jpeg)

**Anna Papafragou**  
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

**CODE OF CONDUCT**<br>
By attending the CogSci 2024 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s [Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-6KkptF0Gn3ZYGJDlpqpwTdImw45Ng0/view?usp=drive_link).

**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY**<br>
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 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Typical models of learning assume incremental estimation of continuously-varying decision variables like expected rewards.  However, this class of models fails to capture more idiosyncratic, discrete heuristics and strategies that people and animals appear to exhibit.  Despite recent advances in strategy discovery using tools like recurrent networks that generalize the classic models, the resulting strategies are often onerous to interpret, making connections to cognition difficult to establish.  We use Bayesian program induction to discover strategies implemented by programs, letting the simplicity of strategies trade off against their effectiveness.  Focusing on bandit tasks, we find strategies that are difficult or unexpected with classical incremental learning, like asymmetric learning from rewarded and unrewarded trials, adaptive horizon-dependent random exploration, and discrete state switching.

**Authors:**

Carlos G. Correa: Princeton University; Tom Griffiths: Princeton University; Nathaniel Daw: Princeton University

Program-Based Strategy Induction for Reinforcement Learning

Choice deadlines are commonly imposed in decision-making research to incentivize speedy responses and sustained attention to the task settings. However, computational models of choice and response times routinely overlook this deadline, instead simply omitting trials past the deadline from further analysis. This choice is made under the implicit assumption that parameter estimation is not significantly affected by ignoring these omissions. Using new tools from likelihood-free inference, here we elucidate the degree to which omitting omissions, even in seemingly benign settings, can lead researchers astray. We explore the phenomenon using a Sequential Sampling Model (SSM) with collapsing boundaries as a test-bed.

**Authors:**

Xiamin Leng: Brown University; Alexander Fengler: Brown University; Amitai Shenhav: Brown University; Michael J. Frank: Brown University

The Perils of Omitting Omissions when Modeling Evidence Accumulation

Generalization to new tasks requires learning of task representations that accurately reflect the similarity structure of the task space. Here, we argue that episodic memory (EM) plays an essential role in this process by stabilizing task representations, thereby supporting the accumulation of structured knowledge. We demonstrate this using a neural network model that infers task representations that minimize the current task's objective function; crucially, the model can retrieve previously encoded task representations from EM and use these to initialize the task inference process. With EM, the model succeeds in learning the underlying task structure; without EM, task representations drift and the network fails to learn the structure. We further show that EM errors can support structure learning by promoting the activation of similar task representations in tasks with similar sensory inputs. Overall, this model provides a novel account of how EM supports the acquisition of structured task representations.

**Authors:**

Qihong Lu: Columbia University; Ali Hummos: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Kenneth Norman: Princeton University

Episodic memory supports the acquisition of structured task representations

Adults are known to have superior working memory to children, but whether this improvement is driven primarily by differences in storage capacity or attentional control is debated. In particular, the understanding of how capacity and control influence the development of working memory is hampered by the fact that most theorizing about the effect of variation in either on behavior has been verbal. To address this, we extended a computational model of working memory to clearly separate the contributions of capacity and control, fitting the model to a recent developmental study. We find that the combined influence of capacity and control on working memory may be more complicated than previously appreciated. In particular, the general pattern of qualitative differences between children and adults could be produced by increasing either capacity or control alone. These results point to a need for additional experimental paradigms to clearly parse the differential impact of working memory components.

**Authors:**

Evan Russek: Princeton University; Cameron Rouse Turner: Princeton University; Emma McEwen: University of St Andrews; Andreea Miruna Miscov: University of St Andrews; Amanda Seed: University of St Andrews; Tom Griffiths: Princeton University

Modeling the Contributions of Capacity and Control to Working Memory Development

An agent-based model for semantic search and retrieval in memory is proposed. The model seeks to generate verbal fluency lists with properties similar to those generated by humans in the semantic fluency task. This model is compared to a random walk in a semantic network in its ability to adjust to the results of 141 undergraduate students in the semantic fluency task in eight different outcomes. We found that the agent-based model fits participants' results better than the random walk model. The results were consistent with optimal foraging theories, and the distributions of the total number of words, similarities, and frequency values were similar to those generated by participants. The potential uses of this model as a virtual environment to experiment with the search and retrieval process in semantic memory are discussed.

**Authors:**

Diego Morales: Adolfo Ibañez University; Enrique Canessa: Adolfo Ibañez University; Sergio E. Chaigneau: Adolfo Ibanez University

An Agent-Based Model of Foraging in Semantic Memory

Humans preferentially recall items that are presented in close temporal proximity together -- a phenomenon known as the "temporal contiguity effect". In this study, we investigate whether this phenomenon emerges naturally when training a recurrent neural network with episodic memory on free recall tasks. The model learns to recall items in the order they were presented, consistent with the human contiguity effect. The strength of this effect predicts the performance of individual networks, mirroring experimental findings in humans where stronger contiguity effects predict higher recall performance. The contiguity effect in the model is supported by a neural representation of item index, resembling the `method of loci'. This differs from prominent computational models of human memory, which use a slow decay of past information to guide sequential retrieval. Our findings provide insights into the mechanisms underlying episodic memory and pave the way for future studies of its interactions with other cognitive processes.

**Authors:**

Moufan Li: New York University; Kristopher T. Jensen: University College London; Marcelo G Mattar: New York University

A neural network model trained on free recall learns the method of loci

Philosophers have long been arguing the precise semantics of different deontic terms within normative statements. However, little research has been done on the human reasoning side of understanding such terms. In this paper, we propose a normative scheme with bitstring semantics that is expressive enough to cover the basic normative concepts in most mainstream schemes proposed in deontic logic research. Even though further confirmation is needed, our explorative experiments on human deontic reasoning have shown results that are consistent with our proposed scheme.

**Authors:**

Wai Wong: KU Leuven; Meimei Yang: KU Leuven; Walter Schaeken: KU Leuven; Lorenz Demey: KU Leuven; Joost Vennekens: KU Leuven

“Must” people reason logically with “permission” in daily situations? An explorative experimental investigation in human reasoning of normative concepts.

Pronoun interpretation seems to be driven by structural factors, but also by factors related to meaning. In a forced-choice pronoun interpretation experiment, we compare the impact of the next-mention bias associated with transfer-of-possession-verbs on the interpretation of three Dutch pronominal forms that differ in the strength of their structural biases: reduced personal pronoun ze ‘she_reduced ’, full personal pronoun zij ‘she_full’, and demonstrative pronoun die ‘that’. In addition to replicating the common Goal-bias associated with transfer-of-possession verbs, results show significant differences in the proportion of pronoun resolved to the preceding subject between all three pronominal forms. However, the effect of the next-mention manipulation did not differ between pronominal forms. These findings are in line with a model of pronoun interpretation that combines structural and meaning-related factors, and present particularly strong evidence against models that posit that pronoun interpretation is the mirror image of pronoun production.

**Authors:**

Jet Hoek: Radboud University; Hans Wilke: University of Groningen

The effect of meaning-related cues on pronoun resolution in Dutch

Recent work shows that participants make asymmetric causal inferences from apparently symmetric correlational statements (e.g., “A is associated with B”). Can we make sense of this behavior in terms of rational language use? Experiment 1 investigates these interpretive preferences—what we call “PACE effects”—in light of theoretical and experimental pragmatics and psycholinguistics. We uncover several linguistic factors that influence them, suggesting that a pragmatic explanation is possible. Yet, since PACE effects do not show that correlational language leads to causal implicatures strong enough to influence action choice in practical decision contexts, Experiment 2 offers new evidence from an experiment that explicitly compares the effects of causal vs. correlational claims on decision-making. Our results suggest that causal inferences from correlation language are an intricate, but possibly

**Authors:**

Daniel Lassiter: University of Edinburgh; Michael Franke: University of Tübingen

The rationality of inferring causation from correlational language

Are abstract sentences associated with specific constructs in dialogue, i.e., higher uncertainty, more curiosity and willingness to continue a conversation, and more causal questions? In three preregistered experiments we address these questions asking participants to evaluate the plausibility of linguistic exchanges referred to concrete and abstract concepts. Results support theories proposing that abstract concepts involve more inner monitoring and social dynamics compared to concrete concepts, and suggest that reaching alignment in dialogue is more effortful with abstract than with concrete concepts.

**Authors:**

Claudia Mazzuca: Sapienza University of Rome; Caterina Villani: University of Bologna; Tommaso Lamarra: University of Bologna; Marianna M Bolognesi: Modern Languages Dep; Anna Borghi: Sapienza University of Rome

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