Netherlands

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

CogSci 2024

Abstract Sentences elicit more Uncertainty and Curiosity than Concrete Sentences

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
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*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

technical paper

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**Friday, July 26** 
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) 
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
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1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture) 
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) 

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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 
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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 
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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 
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**Anna Papafragou** 
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

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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.

This paper introduces a novel perspective to significantly mitigate catastrophic forgetting in continuous learning (CL), which emphasizes models' capacity to preserve existing knowledge and assimilate new information. Current replay-based methods treat every task and data sample equally and thus can not fully exploit the potential of the replay buffer.
In response, we propose COgnitive REplay (CORE), which draws inspiration from human cognitive review processes. CORE includes two key strategies: Adaptive Quantity Allocation and Quality-Focused Data Selection. The former adaptively modulates the replay buffer allocation for each task based on its forgetting rate, while the latter guarantees the inclusion of representative data that best encapsulates the characteristics of each task within the buffer. Our approach achieves an average accuracy of 37.95\% on split-CIFAR10, surpassing the best baseline method by 6.52\%. Additionally, it significantly enhances the accuracy of the poorest-performing task by 6.30\% compared to the top baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/sterzhang/CORE.

**Authors:**

Jianshu Zhang: School of Cyber Science and Engineering; Yankai Fu: School of Cyber Science and Engineering; Ziheng Peng: School of Cyber Science and Engineering; Dongyu Yao: Wuhan University; Kun He: Wuhan University

CORE: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning through Cognitive Replay

Human learning is sensitive to rule-like structure and the curriculum of examples used for training. In tasks governed by succinct rules, learning is more robust when related examples are blocked across trials, but in the absence of such rules, interleaving is more effective. To date, no neural model has simultaneously captured these seemingly contradictory effects. Here we show that this same tradeoff spontaneously emerges with “in-context learning” (ICL) both in neural networks trained with metalearning and in large language models (LLMs). ICL is the ability to learn new tasks “in context” — without weight changes — via an inner-loop algorithm implemented in activation dynamics. Experiments with pretrained LLMs and metalearning transformers show that ICL exhibits the blocking advantage demonstrated in humans on a task involving rule-like structure, and conversely, that concurrent in-weight learning reproduces the interleaving advantage observed in humans on tasks lacking such structure.

**Authors:**

Jacob Russin: Brown; Ellie Pavlick: Brown University; Michael J. Frank: Brown University

Human Curriculum Effects Emerge with In-Context Learning in Neural Networks

This study investigates cue-based memory retrieval during sentence processing. Cue-based retrieval theories argue that the parser uses lexical and structural information as retrieval cues to retrieve items from memory. Evidence for cue-based memory retrieval comes from research showing that non-target representations matching retrieval cues interfere with target retrieval. However, the degree of susceptibility to this similarity-based interference has been debated, having led to the development of different computational models. This study focuses on two cue-based models and tests their predictions in two experiments. The results suggested similarity-based interference, but its patterns were not fully compatible with these models. To reconcile these findings within the framework of cue-based memory retrieval, this paper presents a model that assigns substantial weight to the structure-based cue and incorporates the notions of initial retrieval and revision. Results from simulations indicate that the model incorporating these assumptions provides a better fit to the observed data.

**Authors:**

Hiroki Fujita: University of Potsdam

Memory Retrieval Processes during Real-Time Language Comprehension: Empirical Evidence and Computational Modelling

One hallmark of human language is its combinatoriality---reusing a relatively small inventory of building blocks to create a far larger inventory of increasingly complex structures. 
In this paper, we explore the idea that combinatoriality in language reflects a human inductive bias toward representational efficiency in symbol systems. We develop a computational framework for discovering structure in a writing system. Built on top of state-of-the-art library learning and program synthesis techniques, our computational framework discovers known linguistic structures in the Chinese writing system and reveals how the system evolves towards simplification under pressures for representational efficiency. We demonstrate how a library learning approach, utilizing learned abstractions and compression, may help reveal the fundamental computational principles that underlie the creation of combinatorial structures in human cognition, and offer broader insights into the evolution of efficient communication systems.

**Authors:**

Guangyuan Jiang: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Matthias Hofer: MIT; Jiayuan Mao: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Lionel Wong: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Josh Tenenbaum: MIT; Roger Levy: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Finding structure in logographic writing with library learning

We examine the relation between event segmentation in language and cognition in the domain of motion events, focusing on Turkish, a verb-framed language that segments motion paths in separate linguistic units (verb clauses). We compare motion events that have a path change to those that did not have a path change. In the linguistic task, participants were more likely to use multiple verb phrases when describing events that had a path change compared to those that did not have a path change. In the non-linguistic Dwell Time task, participants viewed self-paced slideshows of still images sampled from the motion event videos in the linguistic task. Dwell times for slides corresponding to path changes were not significantly longer than those for temporally similar slides in the events without a path change. These findings suggest that event units in language may not have strong and stable influences on event segmentation in cognition.

**Authors:**

Bilge Tınaz: Özyeğin University; Ercenur Ünal: Özyeğin University

Event Segmentation in Language and Cognition

Eating onion ice cream is improbable, and levitating ice cream is impossible. But scooping ice cream using sadness is not just impossible: it is inconceivable. While prior work has examined the distinction between improbable and impossible events, there has been little empirical research on inconceivability. Here, we report a behavioral and computational study of inconceivability in three parts. First, we find that humans reliably categorize events as inconceivable, separate from probable, improbable, and impossible. Second, we find that we can decode the modal category of a sentence using language-model-derived estimates of subjective event probabilities. Third, we reproduce a recent finding that improbable events yield slowest response times in a possibility judgment task, and show that inconceivable events are faster to judge than impossible and improbable events. Overall, our results suggest that people distinguish the impossible from the inconceivable, and such distinctions may be based on graded rather than discrete judgments.

**Authors:**

Jennifer Hu: Harvard University; Felix Anthony Sosa: Harvard University; Tomer D. Ullman: Harvard University

Shades of Zero: Distinguishing impossibility from inconceivability

Telicity is an important semantic feature pointing to event construal: telic verb phrases denote bounded events with an inherent endpoint while atelic verb phrases denote unbounded events without such an endpoint. Languages encode telicity in different ways. Unlike English, Mandarin lacks an overt count-mass distinction and allows bare noun objects to form verb phrases. Would this cross-linguistic difference influence event perception? Experiment 1 elicited descriptions of bounded vs. unbounded events from English and Mandarin native speakers. A clear cross-linguistic difference was found: English speakers mostly used telic predicates for bounded events and atelic predicates for unbounded events while Mandarin speakers gave atelic predicates with bare noun objects for both event types. Experiment 2 explored how English and Mandarin speakers tracked the temporal structure of bounded vs. unbounded events. The two language groups performed similarly. The way people describe events may not affect the way they track event temporal profiles.

**Authors:**

Yue Ji: Beijing Institute of Technology; Anna Papafragou: Unversity of Pennsylvania

Do Cross-Linguistic Differences Influence Event Perception?

Daily experiences are conceptualized as events involving multiple participants and their relations (i.e., thematic roles). When describing events, speakers often do not include all event participants involved. Here, we explore how underlying conceptual requirements and language-specific encoding options influence the content of event descriptions in speech and gesture in two typologically different languages (English, Turkish). Focusing on conceptually peripheral instruments whose status is highly debated, we manipulated the conceptual status of event participants by including events that ‘require’ or ‘allow’ otherwise syntactically optional instruments. Results showed that the require-allow distinction did not manifest uniformly in Turkish and English in speech, gesture, or when both modalities were considered. However, mention of highly optional event participants (e.g., allowed instruments) was affected by language-specific syntactic encoding options. We conclude that, under more naturalistic elicitation conditions, planning descriptions of instrument events is more heavily affected by language-specific encoding than conceptual prominence of the roles.

**Authors:**

Christiana Moser: University of Toronto; Bahar Tarakçı: Özyeğin University; Ercenur Ünal: Özyeğin University; Myrto Grigoroglou: University of Toronto

Multimodal Description of Instrument Events in Turkish and English

As AI systems like language models are increasingly integrated into decision-making processes affecting people's lives, it's critical to ensure that these systems have sound moral reasoning. To test whether they do, we need to develop systematic evaluations. We provide a framework that uses a language model to translate causal graphs that capture key aspects of moral dilemmas into prompt templates. With this framework, we procedurally generated a large and diverse set of moral dilemmas---the OffTheRails benchmark---consisting of 50 scenarios and 400 unique test items. We collected moral permissibility and intention judgments from human participants for a subset of our items and compared these judgments to those from two language models (GPT-4 and Claude-2) across eight conditions. We find that moral dilemmas in which the harm is a necessary means (as compared to a side effect) resulted in lower permissibility and higher intention ratings for both participants and language models. The same pattern was observed for evitable versus inevitable harmful outcomes. However, there was no clear effect of whether the harm resulted from an agent's action versus from having omitted to act. We discuss limitations of our prompt generation pipeline and opportunities for improving scenarios to increase the strength of experimental effects.

**Authors:**

Jan-Philipp Fränken: Stanford University; Kanishk Gandhi: Stanford University; Tori Qiu: Stanford University; Ayesha Khawaja: Stanford University; Noah Goodman: Stanford University; Tobias Gerstenberg: Stanford University

Procedural Dilemma Generation for Moral Reasoning in Humans and Language Models

Moral inference is an emerging topic of critical importance in artificial intelligence. The contemporary approach often relies on language modelling to infer moral relevance or moral properties of a concept such as "smoking". This approach  demands complex parameterisation and costly computation, and it tends to disconnect with psychological accounts of moralization. We present a simple cognitive model for moral inference grounded in theories of moralization. Our model  builds on word association network known to  capture  human semantics and draws on rich psychological data. We demonstrate that our moral association graph model performs competitively to state-of-the-art language models, where we evaluate them against a comprehensive set of data for  automated inference of moral norms and moral judgment of concepts, and in-context moral inference. Moreover, we show that our model discovers intuitive concepts underlying  moral judgment and is applicable to informing short-term temporal changes in moral perception.

**Authors:**

Aida Ramezani: University of Toronto; Yang Xu: University of Toronto

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CORE: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning through Cognitive Replay

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