Netherlands

How do humans decide what to look at and when to stop looking? The Rational Action, Noisy Choice for Habituation (RANCH) model formulates looking behaviors as a rational information acquisition process. RANCH instantiates a hypothesis about the perceptual encoding process using a neural network-derived embedding space, which allows it to operate on raw images. In this paper, we show that the model not only captures key looking time patterns such as habituation and dishabituation, but also makes fine-grained, out-of-sample predictions about magnitudes of dishabituation to previously unseen stimuli. We validated those predictions experimentally with a self-paced looking time task in adults (N = 468). We also show that model fits are robust across parameters, but that assumptions about the perceptual encoding process, the learning process and the decision process are all critical for predicting human performance.

**Authors:**

Anjie Cao: Stanford ; Gal Raz: MIT; Rebecca Saxe: MIT; Michael C. Frank: Stanford University

CogSci 2024

Predicting graded dishabituation in a rational learning model using perceptual stimulus embeddings

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The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





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.

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**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.

Differentiating letter shapes accurately is an increasingly crucial competence. Are letters as distinctive as they could be? We used a unique dataset of crowdsourced letter descriptions across 43 writing systems to produce a comprehensive typology of letter shapes for these diverse scripts. We extracted from 19,591 letter classifications, contributed by 1,683 participants, enough features to provide a unique description of all letters in each system. We show that scripts, compared to phoneme inventories, are feature-extensive: they use additional features to do what could be done with a lower number of features, used more efficiently. Compared to 516 phoneme inventories from the P-base dataset, our 43 scripts have lower feature economy (fewer symbols for a given number of features) and lower feature informativeness (a less balanced distribution of feature values). Letter shapes, we argue, having more degrees of freedom than speech sounds, use features in a more wasteful way.

**Authors:**

Yoolim Kim: Wellesley College; Marc Allassonnière-Tang: CNRS; Helena Miton: Santa Fe Institute; Olivier Morin: PSL University

Letter shapes phonology: Feature economy and informativeness in 43 writing systems

Here we used deep neural network + hidden Markov model (DNN+HMM) to provide a computational account for the relationship among holistic processing (HP), face scanning pattern and face recognition performance. The model accounted for the positive associations between HP and eyes-focused face scanning pattern/face recognition performance observed in the literature regardless of the version of the composite task used to measure HP. Interestingly, we observed a quadratic relationship between HP and face scanning pattern, where models being highly eyes-focused or highly nose-focused had lower HP. By inspecting fixation locations and associated attention window size in the model and XAI methods, we found that the eyes- and nose-focused models both developed local and holistic internal representations during training, and their difference was in the temporal dynamics of how these representations were used. Our findings demonstrated how computational modeling could unravel the mechanisms underlying cognition not readily observable in human data.

**Authors:**

Wei Xing: University of Hong Kong; Yueyuan Zheng: University of Hong Kong; Antoni B. Chan: City University of Hong Kong; Janet Hsiao: Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Is Holistic Processing Associated with Face Scanning Pattern and Performance in Face Recognition? Evidence from Deep Neural Network with Hidden Markov Modeling

In this paper, we test the effect of manipulating discrimination difficulty on subsequent generalization of learning and in particular, on the peak shift effect. Participants learned a discrimination where one stimulus led to an outcome (S+) and another stimulus led to no outcome (S-). Difficulty was manipulated by varying the degree of similarity between the S+ and S- across groups (easy/medium/hard). In contrast to similar studies in animals, we found that increasing the difficulty of the discrimination resulted in less peak shift. Using a hierarchical mixture model, we characterize the effects of discrimination difficulty on relational- and similarity based responding, and show for the first time, a similar mixture of responding on stimulus identification gradients. We conclude that peak shift on generalization and identification measures can be explained by mixtures of participants responding in different ways.

**Authors:**

Jessica C. Lee: University of Sydney; Tamara Cahyadi: Macquarie University; Peter Lovibond: University of New South Wales; René Schlegelmilch: University of Bremen

Effects of Discrimination Difficulty on Peak Shift and Generalization

We propose that kinds relate to particular things either constitutively or contingently. Taxonomic categories of animals and artifacts constitutively relate their members: DOG and CAR group things by aspects of the forms of their matter; the forms that make them things instead of stuff. Categories of things in roles or with diseases contingently relate to their members: LAWYER and DIABETIC group things by forms other than the forms that make them things. We confirm this distinction in five experiments with American adults.

**Authors:**

Alexander Noyes: New York University; Katherine Ritchie: University of California, Irvine; Marjorie Rhodes: New York University

Constitutive and Contingent Kinds: Relations between kind, form, and identity

In term series problems where multiple mental models can be constructed, partial-order models can be created as mental representations, which make it easier to perceive the symmetry of the terms. To test these hypotheses, we categorized multi-model (indeterminate) term series problems according to the patterns of partial-order models that could be constructed, and analyzed the reasoning performance for each pattern. These results suggest that reasoners tend to use the symmetry of terms to reduce the cognitive load of reasoning. Analysis of the patterns of incorrect answers also suggests that attempts to exploit the symmetry of the term may be biased, leading to errors in reasoning.

**Authors:**

Takafumi Aoi: Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Shohei Hidaka: Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Symmetric Bias in Reasoning: Error Analysis of Indeterminate Term Series Problems

We can evaluate features of problems and their potential solutions well before we can effectively solve them. When considering a game we have never played, for instance, we might infer whether it is likely to be challenging, fair, or fun simply from hearing the game rules, prior to deciding whether to invest time in learning the game or trying to play it well. Many studies of game play have focused on optimality and expertise, characterizing how people and computational models play based on moderate to extensive search and after playing a game dozens (if not thousands or millions) of times. Here, we study how people reason about a range of simple but novel connect-n style board games. We ask people to judge how fair and how fun the games are from very little experience: just thinking about the game for a minute or so, before they have ever actually played with anyone else, and we propose a resource-limited model that captures their judgments using only a small number of partial game simulations and almost no lookahead search. For more information about this project, see https://sites.google.com/view/intuitive-game-theory

**Authors:**

Cedegao E Zhang: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Katherine M Collins: University of Cambridge; Lionel Wong: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Adrian Weller: University of Cambridge; Josh Tenenbaum: MIT

People use fast, goal-directed simulation to reason about novel games

When reasoning about a claim, it makes sense to be more persuaded if lots of other people agree. But, there are many factors that make weighing the evidence behind a consensus complicated. For example, a consensus might be more or less informative depending on the type of claim, or whether each consensus member formed their opinions independently. These factors might also influence people differently depending on their own assumptions or preferences. In this study we used a mock social media paradigm to assess how persuaded people were by two factors: the presence of consensus (no consensus vs. consensus), and source independence (a consensus based on independent information sources vs. a consensus formed off shared, dependent sources). We varied these factors at both the group and individual level. At the group level, we assessed a third factor: whether people were influenced by the type of claim being reasoned about (we assessed 60 different claims divided into 4 categories). Almost everyone was more persuaded by consensus trials compared to no consensus trials. However, the strength of this effect was credibly stronger if the claim was likely to have a ground truth. We found that around one third of participants were sensitive to source independence. Of these, three quarters were more persuaded by a consensus based on independent sources, but the quarter who were more persuaded by dependent sources were persuaded just as strongly.

**Authors:**

Manikya Alister: The University of Melbourne; Keith James Ransom: University of Adelaide; Saoirse Connor Desai: University of Sydney; Ee Von Soh: University of Melbourne; Brett Hayes: University of New South Wales; Andrew Perfors: University of Melbourne

Individual and Topic Level Differences in Sensitivity to Online Consensus Effects

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Virtual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which re- searchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such representations. We find that this method forces researchers to take a god’s-eye view when describing dynamical relationships be- tween entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and concept *types*, such as *the belief that cats are silly*, and *the concept CAT*, while preserving belief and concept *tokens* in individual cognizers’ minds. We conclude with some further key advantages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and linguistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly.

**Authors:**

Iris Oved: Independent Scholar; Nikhil Krishnaswamy: Colorado State University; James Pustejovsky: Brandeis University; Joshua K Hartshorne: Boston College

Computational Thought Experiments for a More Rigorous Philosophy and Science of the Mind

Aphantasia, namely the inability to voluntarily form visual mental imagery, does not, counterintuitively, impair the affected from successfully performing mental imagery tasks. One way of explaining this finding is to posit that aphantasics, despite their claim to the contrary, can form visual imagery, a position here referred to as aphantasia skepticism. This article outlines and rejects two types of aphantasia skepticism and argues that the position results from what is coined the visualizer’s fallacy, namely the false belief that visual mental imagery is necessary to carry out mental imagery tasks. Furthermore, it is argued that the visualizer’s fallacy and the resulting aphantasia skepticism are not only potentially harmful to aphantasics but may also lead to an impoverished view of the dynamics of cognition in general.

**Authors:**

Christian Oliver Scholz: Ruhr-Universität Bochum

The Visualizer's Fallacy: Why Aphantasia Skepticism Underestimates the Dynamics of Cognition

This paper uses phylogenetic modeling to investigate the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of sound symbolism in the world's languages. 
Applying our model to sound-meaning correspondences reported in the literature, we find that many previously established associations are weaker than expected when analyzed using our framework. This is possibly because certain sound-meaning associations are artifacts of slow-changing vocabulary items rather than specific preferences for certain sounds in words with certain meanings. For sound-meaning associations for which we find evidence, the maintenance of sound symbolism appears to be due to a tendency to preserve words in certain meanings if certain sounds are present.

**Authors:**

Chundra Cathcart: University of Zurich; Gerhard Jäger: Tübingen University

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Letter shapes phonology: Feature economy and informativeness in 43 writing systems

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