Netherlands

Construal Level Theory (CLT) suggests that we represent objects close to us in a concrete and modal fashion, and that representations become more abstract and amodal with increasing distance from ourselves. Evidence for such an association of abstraction level and distance comes from the Implicit Association Test (IAT), where participants are faster when pressing one key for “near” and “concrete” and another key for “far” and “abstract” targets (congruent), than when “near” is paired with “abstract” and “far” with “concrete” (incongruent). However, previous experiments might have confounded distance and abstraction by employing inherently near and far targets (e.g., CHAIR vs. SUN) that might also differ in their abstractness. Here, we thus experimentally induced different distances in a learning phase before a subsequent IAT task. Even with this controlled distance manipulation, a pronounced congruency effect emerged, providing further support for an association of distance and abstraction level as suggested by CLT.

**Authors:**

Karin M. Bausenhart: University of Tuebingen; Satu Kluvich: Eberhard Karls Universität ; Rolf Ulrich: University of Tübingen; Barbara Kaup: University of Tübingen

CogSci 2024

Construal Level Theory: Testing the Association of Abstraction Level and Object Distance with Experimentally Induced Distances

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** 
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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) 


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#### **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** 
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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

English allows for both compounds (e.g., London-made) and phrasal paraphrases (e.g., made in London). While these constructions have roughly the same truth-conditional meaning, we hypothesize that the compound allows less freedom to express the nature of the semantic relationship between the participle and the pre-participle nominal. We thus predict that the pre-participle slot is more constrained than the equivalent position in the phrasal construction. We test this prediction in a large corpus by measuring the entropy of corresponding nominal slots, conditional on the participle used. That is, we compare the entropy of α in compound construction slots like “α-[V]ed” to the entropy of α in phrasal constructions like “[V]ed by α” for a given verb V. As predicted, there is significantly lower entropy in the compound construction than in the phrasal construction. We consider how these predictions follow from more general grammatical properties and processing factors.

**Authors:**

Kristie Denlinger: The University of Texas at Austin; Stephen Mark Wechsler: The University of Texas at Austin; Kyle Mahowald: The University of Texas at Austin

Participle-Prepended Nominals Have Lower Entropy Than Nominals Appended After the Participle

This pupillometric study investigates the relevance of domain-final intonation for attention-orienting in German, employing a changing-state oddball paradigm with rising, falling and neutral intonation on deviant stimuli. Pupil dilation responses (PDR) to deviants were shown to be affected by their intonation contours, strengthening the case for the role of intonational edge tones in attention-orienting. Moreover, the magnitude and duration of the PDR response was higher for rises than falls, indicating the fundamental role of intonational rises for the activation of the attention-orienting mechanism in speech perception.

**Authors:**

Maria Lialiou: University of Cologne; Jesse Harris: UCLA; Martine Grice: University of Cologne; Petra B. Schumacher: University of Cologne

Attention Allocation to Deviants with Intonational Rises and Falls: Evidence from Pupillometry

This study investigates the representation of garden-path sentences and its interaction with memory retrieval. Garden-path sentences are initially misanalysed, and the initial misrepresentations tend to affect language comprehension, even after revision. Memory retrieval targets items in memory based on their representations. Our main research question investigates whether memory retrieval targets initial misrepresentations or revised representations in garden-path sentences. Using the cue-based memory retrieval model, we generated predictions for potential processing patterns stemming from this research question. The experiments used lexicality maze, self-paced reading, and offline comprehension questions. The results showed largely similar processing patterns between garden-path and non-garden-path sentences, suggesting that initial misrepresentations do not affect memory retrieval.

**Authors:**

Hiroki Fujita: University of Potsdam; Shravan Vasishth: Potsdam

Cue-Based Memory Retrieval in Garden-Path Sentences

Children learn better through shared social experiences. Particularly, storytelling is a successful learning strategy that facilitates learning. These shared experiences are reflected in neural synchrony, which underlies predict understanding of the learned information. For adults, the scaffolding strategy, a shared social experience that involves active engagement rather than passive listening, has been shown to promote learning and has been linked with higher neural synchrony compared to passive learning. However, in the context of storytelling, it is unclear whether children will perform higher levels of neural synchrony as well as improved performances when they scaffold the learned information (tell a story about it) compared to when they passively listen. Here, we compare learning outcomes and neural basis of two learning strategies in young school-aged children in the context of storytelling.

**Authors:**

Nina Besser Ilan: Tel Aviv University; Hadas Shavit: Tel Aviv University; nofar kochavi: Tel Aviv University; Sagi Jaffe-Dax: Tel Aviv University

Listening to a Story or Creating One: Children’s Performances and Brain Activity in Storytelling-Based Learning

Despite the centrality of caregiving relationships in the lives of infants, little is known about whether and how infants represent these relationships characterized by strong attachment and asymmetry in obligation and skills. The current studies (N=95) investigate whether 8-to-10-month-old infants attend to two cues—affiliative touch and physical size—to predict who will respond to distress. In Study 1 (n=49), infants expected larger characters to respond to the emotional needs of smaller characters, only when they saw affiliative touch (proportion looking time at large character: BF10=6.72). In Study 2 (n=46), they did not expect smaller characters to respond to larger characters (proportion looking time: BF10=0.17), suggesting they expect asymmetrical roles in caregiving relationships. Collectively, these findings suggest that humans have an early-emerging ability to recognize key relationships in their social world.

**Authors:**

Christina Steele: Harvard University; Megan Richardson: Harvard University; Azwayla Taylor: Harvard University ; Denis Tatone: Central European University; Ashley J Thomas: Harvard University

Early Threads of Connection: Probing Infants’ Early Understandings of Caregiving Relationships

Adults routinely tailor their communication to others' auditory access, such as substituting gestures for speech in noisy environments. Yet, assessing the effectiveness of different communicative acts given others’ perceptual access—especially when it differs from one's own—requires mental-state reasoning, which undergoes significant developmental change. Can young children tailor their communication to others’ auditory access? In Study 1, parental report (n=98) indicated that most children, by age 4, adjust their communicative behaviors in noisy settings. Study 2 elicited these behaviors experimentally with 4- to 5-year-olds (n=68). Children taught how a novel toy works to a learner who wore headphones playing either loud music or nothing. Children were more likely to use physical demonstrations, and less likely to use verbal explanations, when the learner's auditory access was obstructed. These findings illustrate how mental-state reasoning might support children's ability to communicate successfully across perceptually-compromised contexts and individuals.

**Authors:**

Aaron Chuey: Stanford University; Catherine Qing: Stanford University; Rondeline M. Williams: Stanford University; Michael C. Frank: Stanford University; Hyowon Gweon: Stanford University

Show or Tell? Preschool-aged children adapt their communication to their partner’s auditory access

When children make decisions about whom to trust or learn from, they consider not only the informant’s reliability but also the social bond. Previous research often assigned a social label to informants without investigating how the interactive dynamics between informants and children influence learning and trust. This study investigates 3- to 6-year-old children’s preference towards informants who deliver instructions with or without coordination. In two experiments, children evaluated coordinative and non-coordinative informants on game-playing capability, willingness to engage with or learn from the informants, and selective trust in unrelated tasks. Children consistently preferred coordinative informants, perceiving them as more capable and trustworthy, over informants who demonstrated the information without coordinative turn-taking. This preference persisted across age groups, challenging previous notions about children's preference for information completeness. The findings highlight the prosocial effects of coordination, extending its influence beyond peer relationships to significantly impact selective trust when learning from knowledgeable individuals.

**Authors:**

Yiqun Chen: Institute of Psychology; Liqi Zhu: Institute of Psychology; Yingjia Wan: Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

It's How You Teach, Not What You Teach: Preschoolers Prefer Coordinative Instruction from Informants

Time words like ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ are abstract, and are interpreted relative to the context in which they are produced: the word ‘tomorrow’ refers to a different point in time now than in 24 hours. We tested 112 3- to 5-year-old Hindi-speaking children on their knowledge of ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’, which are represented by the same word in Hindi-Urdu: ‘kal’. We found that Hindi learners performed better than English learners when tested on actual past and future events, but that performance for hypothetical events was poor for both groups. Compatible with a “syntactic bootstrapping” account, we conclude that syntactic tense information – which is necessary for differentiating ‘yesterday’ from ‘tomorrow’ in Hindi – may play a stronger role in learning these words than mapping of specific words to particular past and future events (“event mapping”).

**Authors:**

Urvi Maheshwari: University of California San Diego; David Barner: UC San Diego

Twice Upon a Time: Children Use Syntactic Bootstrapping to Learn the Meaning of Yesterday and Tomorrow

The recent upswing in both use and acceptance of they/them as a singular pronoun has led to it becoming potentially ambiguous between singular and plural interpretations in cases like “Alex went running with Liz. They fell down” in which Alex is known to use they/them pronouns. The current work uniquely investigates how children interpret they in these ambiguous cases. Specifically, 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and an adult control group underwent a partial replication of Arnold et al. (2021), wherein they answered comprehension questions regarding a series of two-sentence stories. Results show that children can successfully map the pronoun they onto a singular individual when there are no plural competitors and that they interpret ambiguous they similarly to adults, although 5-year-olds interpret this pronoun as singular more often than 8-year-olds. These findings indicate that older children potentially undergo a form of overregularization of they due to grammatical rules enforced at school.

**Authors:**

Anissa Baird: University of Toronto; Emily Atkinson: University of Toronto Mississauga

The Interpretation of Ambiguous "They": Children and Adults Pattern Together

Early word learning involves mapping individual words to their meanings and building organized semantic representations among words. Previous corpus-based studies (e.g., using text from websites, newspapers, child-directed speech corpora) demonstrated that linguistic information such as word co-occurrence alone is sufficient to build semantically organized word knowledge. The present study explored two new research directions to advance understanding of how infants acquire semantically organized word knowledge. First, infants in the real world hear words surrounded by contextual information. Going beyond inferring semantic knowledge merely from language input, we examined the role of extra-linguistic contextual information in learning semantic knowledge. Second, previous research relies on large amounts of linguistic data to demonstrate in-principle learning, which is unrealistic compared with the input children receive. Here, we showed
that incorporating extra-linguistic information provides an efficient mechanism through which semantic knowledge can be acquired with a small amount of data infants perceive in everyday learning contexts, such as toy play.

**Authors:**

Jane Yang: University of Texas at Austin; Yayun Zhang: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Chen Yu: University of Texas at Austin

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Participle-Prepended Nominals Have Lower Entropy Than Nominals Appended After the Participle

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