Netherlands

The decision to engage in lifelong learning often entails a motivational conflict, requiring individuals to balance potential benefits against the costs of engagement. Approach- avoidance motivation occurs when an action involves simultaneous positive and negative outcomes, necessitating a choice. This concept has primarily been studied in emotionally charged decisions linked to fear or anxiety, relevant for clinical settings. Our aim is to shift the focus to the cost of engagement in learning and educational settings. In a society marked by high demands and numerous tools for knowledge updating, lifelong learning may be beneficial for continuous individual development and societal contribution. We introduce a new framework that intricately connects motivation and learning processes with cognition, highlighting the pivotal roles of executive functions and decision-making processes. This article delves into the confluence of lifelong learning, cognitive conflict, and approach- avoidance motivation within the context of education and learning processes.

**Authors:**

Angélica Mendes: University of Luxembourg; Samuel Greiff: University of Luxembourg; David Levi Tekampe: University of Luxembourg; Katarzyna Bobrowicz: University of Luxembourg

CogSci 2024

Approach-Avoidance Motivation in Lifelong Learning: A New Framework for Understanding the Decision-Making Process behind Voluntary Learning

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** 
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** 
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) 
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) 
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
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) 

**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) 
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture) 
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) 

**Saturday, July 27** 
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) 
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture) 
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


#### **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** 
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** 
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.

technical paper

How humans process and utilize experienced outcomes and actions to adapt to a constantly evolving and noisy world is an important area of research. We investigate the role of the pupil-linked arousal system in adaptive value-based decision-making in an uncertain and changing environment using a two-armed bandit task with occasional changes in reward contingencies. We find that pupil size fluctuation encodes reward- and uncertainty-related values across trials; moreover, pupil size reflects future-choice-dependent contributions of these variables to learning and decision-making: larger pupil encoding of reward prediction error (RPE) promotes reward-driven switches in choice, while larger pupil encodings of estimation uncertainty (EU) promotes uncertainty-driven switches in choice. Furthermore, individual differences in pupil’s encoding of RPE and EU correlate with individual variabilities in choice bias and task performance. Given the relationship of pupil size to noradrenergic and cholinergic modulations, these results provide insights into the computational and neural process underlying adaptive decision-making.

**Authors:**

Zoe W He: University of California, San Diego; Maëva L’Hôtellier: CEA Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France Université de Paris; Alexander Paunov: CEA Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France Université de Paris; Dalin Guo: University of California, San Diego; Florent Meyniel: CEA Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France Université de Paris; Angela J Yu: Technical University of Darmstadt

Pupil size reflects the relevance of reward prediction error and estimation uncertainty in upcoming choice

Whereas cognitive models of learning often assume direct experience with both the features of an event and with a true label or outcome, much of everyday learning arises from hearing the opinions of others, without direct access to either the experience or the ground truth outcome. We consider how people can learn which opinions to trust in such scenarios by extending the hedge algorithm: a classic solution for learning from diverse information sources. We first introduce a semi-supervised variant we call the delusional hedge capable of learning from both supervised and unsupervised experiences. In two experiments, we examine the alignment between human judgments and predictions from the standard hedge, the delusional hedge, and a heuristic baseline model. Results indicate that humans effectively incorporate both labeled and unlabeled information in a manner consistent with the delusional hedge algorithm---suggesting that human learners not only gauge the accuracy of information sources but also their consistency with other reliable sources. The findings advance our understanding of human learning from diverse opinions, with implications for the development of algorithms that better capture how people learn to weigh conflicting information sources.

**Authors:**

Yun-Shiuan Chuang: University of Wisconsin - Madison; Jerry Zhu: University of Wisconsin-Madison; Timothy Rogers: University of Wisconsin - Madison

The Delusional Hedge Algorithm as a Model of Human Learning from Diverse Opinions

We propose a neural dynamic architecture that models negation processing. The architecture receives a visual scene and a relational phrase like ``The blue object is not to the right of the yellow object'' or ``The blue object is to the right of the green object'' as input, and autonomously determines whether the phrase correctly describes the visual scene. The model is built out of empirically founded components for perceptually grounded cognition and constrained by neural principles. We demonstrate that the model can explain two commonly found reaction time effects: the negation effect in which reaction times are higher for negated than for affirmative phrases, and the polarity-by-truth-value interaction effect in which reaction times for false negated phrases are  faster than those for true negated phrases whereas the opposite is true for affirmative phrases. The model is consistent with some aspects of the two-step simulation theory.

**Authors:**

Lea Kati: Ruhr-University Bochum; Daniel Sabinasz: Institut für Neuroinformatik; Gregor Schöner: Ruhr-Universität Bochum; Barbara Kaup: University of Tübingen

Interaction of polarity and truth value - A neural dynamic architecture of negation processing

Cognitive processes underlie economic relations. In this paper, we develop a conceptual, mathematical, and computational framework for modeling market exchange as a series of dynamically interacting cognitive processes. Specifically, we show how advertisers can build trust and gain confidence in their pricing power to the point that they erode trust and undermine the efficacy of their advertising. Customers conversely orient towards advertisers seeking information or turn away from them as unreliable communicators. These behaviors and the patterns they generate occur inside a state space of unallocated perceived value. They constitute a small subset of the full range of possible strategic and adaptive responses that define cognitive microeconomics.

**Authors:**

Jad Soucar: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); Francis Steen: University of California

The Cognitive Dynamics of Advertising

Music-making relies on precise temporal control and mutual coordination among performers, particularly to maintain tempo. We evaluate the impact of human-machine interaction and rhythmic subdivisions on tempo change in musical trios. A synchronization-continuation task was performed by trios of human participants interacting with confederates or with algorithmic (i.e. machine) models. Sounded tone onsets were produced by a linear error-correction model, delay-coupled model, and Kuramoto model that replaced a human participant. Inter-onset intervals were examined from participants who performed rhythms in both in-phase and anti-phase conditions while a third group member was either a human or algorithmic model. Trios drifted toward faster tempi more when they contained a human than an algorithmic model. Tempo drift also increased for the aligned rhythms (in-phase) compared to rhythms with rhythmic subdivisions (anti-phase). Finally, the tested algorithmic models replicated the confederate’s tempo drift without the use of any period correction mechanisms. This research advances our understanding of unintentional tempo drift, offering insights into ensemble dynamics and models of temporal coordination in groups. Implications for musical coordination and avenues for future research are discussed.

**Authors:**

Bavo Van Kerrebroeck: McGill University; Marcelo Wanderley: McGill University; Alexander P Demos: University of Illinois at Chicago; Caroline Palmer: McGill University

Human-machine trios show different tempo changes in musical tasks

This review explores the complex relationship between Fear of
Falling (FoF) and Fear of Heights (FoH), and their impact on
human postural control. FoF encompasses a spectrum of psychological
and physiological responses that dynamically influence
postural control, while FoH involves perceptual distortions
and heightened physiological arousal in response to elevated
environments. Through a comprehensive literature review,
we examine the research methods and findings of studies
on FoF and FoH. We further propose that Optimal Feedback
Control (OFC) theory is a suitable framework to understand
the computational aspects of how these fears modify postural
control. We aim to provide a nuanced understanding of
FoF and FoH, not only as psychological phenomena but as
complex, dynamic interactions of cognitive, physiological, and
motor processes influencing an individual’s interaction with
their environment.

**Authors:**

Ruslan Spartakov: Philipps University Marburg; Alap Kshirsagar: Technische Universität Darmstadt; Dominik Mühl: Philipps-University Marburg; Raphael Schween: Philipps University Marburg; Dominik M Endres: Philipps-Universitaet, Dept. Psychology; Frank Bremmer: Philipps University Maburg; Christiane A. Melzig: Philipps University Marburg; Jan Peters: Technische Universität Darmstadt

Balancing on the Edge: Review and Computational Framework on the Dynamics of Fear of Falling and Fear of Heights in Postural Control

Word senses rise and fall due to a variety of causes. Previous research has explored how words grow novel senses, but the opposite problem of word sense decline is much less studied. Inspired by recent work on word decline, we investigate the cognitive factors that might explain the historical decline of word senses. We formalize a set of eight psycholinguistic predictors and assess their roles in discriminating declining senses from stable ones over the past two centuries in English. We find that semantic density, change in usage frequency in the semantic neighbourhood, and contextual diversity all predict word sense decline. Our study elucidates the cognitive underpinnings of word sense decline as the lexicon evolves.

**Authors:**

Aniket Kali: University of Toronto; Yang Xu: University of Toronto; Suzanne Stevenson: University of Toronto

Cognitive Factors in Word Sense Decline

We conduct a large-scale study of online community variation in language. We show that factors of efficient communication, which have been shown to drive crosslinguistic variation in lexical semantic systems, also play a role in within-language variation across 1926 English-language Reddit communities. We study variation in stancetaking behaviour, a domain where efficient communication may be influenced by social motivations for language use. We find that communities indeed have efficient stancetaking systems, particularly with respect to their own communicative needs. However, contrasting with crosslinguistic work, we find that communities are often not optimized for their needs. Moreover, we find that community-level social factors correlate with how optimized they are. These results highlight the importance of accounting for social pressures for language use when studying how efficient communication drives variation.

**Authors:**

Jai Aggarwal: University of Toronto; Julia Watson: University of Toronto; Prabuddha Senapati: University Of Toronto; Suzanne Stevenson: University of Toronto

The (in)efficiency of within-language variation in online communities

This study explores human capabilities in distinguishing and recognizing entities that change over time from those that do not. We specifically investigate the linguistic distinction between "individual-level predicates" (ILPs) and "stage-level predicates" (SLPs). Our empirical approach focuses on how humans visually distinguish these two types. We performed a corpus analysis, in which a set of image captions were randomly extracted and annotated by experts with either SLP or ILP labels. The findings indicated a predominance of SLPs over ILPs in the image captions. We then performed automatic annotation on a large dataset of image captions and conducted a machine-learning experiment on image classification based on ILSs and SLPs. Our results demonstrated that SLPs were identified with high accuracy, while ILPs were identified with about chance level, substantially lower than human capabilities. Given the analyses, we discuss what features of the image contribute to distinguishing between ILPs and SLPs.

**Authors:**

Yuri Sato: Ochanomizu University; Ayaka Suzuki: Chiba University; Koji Mineshima: Keio University

Capturing stage-level and individual-level information from photographs: Human-AI comparison

We conducted a case study on how unreliable and/or unrepresentative stimuli in psycholinguistics research may impact the generalizability of experimental findings. Using the domain of lexical ambiguity as a foil, we analyzed 2033 unique words (6481 tokens) from 214 studies. Specifically, we examined how often studies agreed on the ambiguity types assigned to a word (i.e., homonymy, polysemy, and monosemy), and how well the words represented the populations underlying each ambiguity type. We observed far from perfect agreement in terms of how words are assigned to ambiguity types.  We also observed that coverage of the populations is relatively poor and biased, leading to the use of a narrower set of words and associated properties. This raises concerns about the degree to which prior theoretical claims have strong empirical support, and offers targeted directions to improve research practices that are relevant to a broad set of domains.

**Authors:**

Jiangtian Li: University of Toronto Scarborough; Blair C. Armstrong: University of Toronto

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Pupil size reflects the relevance of reward prediction error and estimation uncertainty in upcoming choice

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