Netherlands

One feature of mental time travel is the ability to recursively embed temporal perspectives across different times: humans can remember how we anticipated the future and anticipate how we will remember the past. This recursive structure might be formalised in terms of a “grammar” that is reflective of but more general than linguistic notions of absolute and relative tense. Here I provide a foundation for this grammatical framework, emphasising a bounded (rather than unbounded) role of recursion in supporting mental time travel to a limited temporal depth and to actual and possible scenarios. Anticipated counterfactual thinking, for instance, entails three levels of mental time travel to a possible scenario (“in the future I will reflect on how my past self could have taken a different future action”) and is implicated in complex human decision-making. This perspective calls for further research into the nature and origins of recursive mental time travel.0

CogSci 2024

Remembered Futures and Anticipated Pasts: The Recursive Grammar of Mental Time Travel

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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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**
<div style="position:relative;padding-top:0;width:900px;height:500px;"><iframe style="position:absolute;border:none;width:100%;height:100%;left:0;top:0;" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/cble/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>


**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.

Seeing a person preparing to perform an action and later remembering having seen subsequent phases of the action, but not previous phases. This is what a theory on the role of the motor system in the creation and recovery of memories predicts can happen. We investigate memory for action after viewing an image representing an actor acting on a series of everyday objects. The participants in one experiment viewed a series of still photos of unfolding actions on objects (e.g., blowing the nose), and 15 minutes later they were asked to complete a recognition task. At recognition, participants viewed photos representing temporally distant moments, backward or forward in time compared to the original, along with the same photos seen at encoding. Results showed that participants tended to accept forward photos more than backward photos. In a pilot study, we explored the role of the temporal distance between encoding and recognition. Results showed that when 3 days elapsed between the encoding and recognition phases, participants did not tend to accept forward photos more than backward photos.0

False Memories of Actions: When Motor Simulation is Deceptive

A Federated Graph Learning Framework for Brain Connectome

Reservoir computing (RC) offers distinct advantages in extracting spatiotemporal information with low training costs by separating recurrent neural networks into a fixed network with recurrent connections. The quality of the fixed network, known as the reservoir, plays a pivotal role in the performance of the RC system. Our work aims to provide a unified synaptic development framework for RC, constructing a more biologically plausible reservoir to model and understand the neural networks development within the human brain. In this paper, we propose an Autonomous Synaptic Development Reservoir Computing model (ASD-RC) based on an adaptive network of phase oscillators. The reservoir autonomously adjusts the distribution of connection weights in response to external stimuli, forming a task-specific structure. Through experiments and theoretical analyses, we demonstrate that ASD-RC can emulate various synaptic development rules of biological neural networks in \textit{vivo}, including the Hebbian rule and STDP. Furthermore, experiments reveal that combining different development rules can enhance performance on prediction tasks compared to using a single development rule, showcasing the emergence and effects of synergistic development that improve information processing capacity.0

Unveiling the Synergistic Effects: A Unified Autonomous Synaptic Development Mechanism for Reservoir Computing

Decoding naturalistic stimuli from neural recordings is a significant challenge in systems neuroscience, primarily due to the high-dimensional and nonlinear nature of stimulus-response interactions, and is further exacerbated by the limited availability and noisiness of neural data. While contemporary approaches that incorporate generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), attempt to address these issues by mapping neural responses to latent representations, they do not fully overcome these obstacles. In this work, we present a novel paradigm of differential neural decoding (dicoding) that focuses on the relative changes in response patterns, which not only expands the neural training data quadratically but also inherently denoises it. To determine the corresponding stimulus changes, this method leverages the Euclidean and feature-disentangled properties of the underlying latents through vector arithmetic. As such, we not only effectively exploit the latent space but also achieve semantically meaningful latent offsets in the context of the stimuli, resulting in improved sample efficiency. We trained a decoder to predict changes in latent vectors based on the corresponding changes in neural responses. The absolute latent vector itself was derived by vector addition of the predicted latent change (indicative of stimulus shift) to a reference latent, which was fed to the generator for the reconstruction of the perceived stimulus. Our results show that this geometrically principled approach facilitates more effective reconstruction of naturalistic stimuli from noisy and limited neural data.0

Get more from less: Differential neural decoding for effective reconstruction of perceived naturalistic stimuli from limited and noisy training data

An important issue in the semantic memory literature concerns the relative importance of experience-based sensorimotor versus language corpus-based distributional information in conceptual representations. Here we examine how each sort of information is associated with the EEG response to words in a property verification task in which participants indicated whether or not a property term (such as ”red”) is typically obtained for a concept term (such as ”APPLE”). To define and measure each type of information, we operationalized distributional and sensorimotor information using cosine distance measurements derived from GloVe Embeddings and Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms respectively. We then modeled single-trial EEG responses to property words in a property verification task using regression models. Our findings indicate that semantic processing in this task simultaneously incorporates distributional and sensorimotor information, and their contribution is shaped by task-relevant linguistic context. We aim for our study to contribute to a critical examination of such information operationalizations and also encourage a systematic evaluation of their performance across tasks, particularly for
EEG measurements.0

Effects of Distributional and Sensorimotor Distance Measures on the EEG during Property Verification

The cognitive processes underlying mental folding have been investigated for decades, while the neural correlates associated with this spatial transformation are barely understood. This study combines cognitive modeling with EEG recordings from 41 subjects to investigate the general mechanisms of mental spatial transformation. By linking model-based simulation and electrocortical activity, we identified brain areas involved during mental folding. Our novel approach showed active central parietal and left parietal, as well as occipital areas during spatial storage, while the right parietal cortex was associated with spatial transformation. The left occipital and parietal regions were active especially during visual baseline trials, while the right parietal region exhibited stronger activity for more difficult folding trials, replicating previous results. The varying activation patterns imply different cognitive loads for storage and for transformation depending on task difficulty.0

Identifying Cognitive Processes and Neural Substrates of Spatial Transformation in a Mental Folding Task with Cognitive Modeling

Spatial cognition is fundamental to human behavior, but people differ in how they remember spatial relations, variably using body-based (egocentric) and environment-based (allocentric) spatial reference frames. Despite decades of study, the causes of this variation and flexibility in spatial memory remain unclear. Here we show that people spontaneously use different reference frames on different spatial axes at the same time. When remembering the placement of a target object in a 2-dimensional array, Indigenous Tsimane' adults preferentially used allocentric space to determine lateral placement and egocentric space to determine sagittal placement in the same action. This effect of axis was also significant among US university students, whose overall preference for egocentric space was stronger on the sagittal than lateral axis. These findings support a novel account of spatial cognitive diversity and suggest that people across cultures habitually integrate egocentric and allocentric spatial reference frames into the same action.0

Multidimensional spatial memory: One action, two reference frames

While Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) are promising for modelling spatial cognition, their application is currently limited to artificially generated images and simple spatial queries. We propose VSA4VQA – a novel 4D implementation of VSAs that implements a mental representation of natural images for the challenging task of Visual Question Answering (VQA). VSA4VQA is the first model to scale a VSA to complex spatial queries. Our method is based on the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA) to encode objects in a hyperdimensional vector space. To encode natural images, we extend the SPA to include dimensions for object’s width and height in addition to their spatial location. To perform spatial queries we further introduce learned spatial query masks and integrate a pre-trained vision-language model for answering attribute-related questions. We evaluate our method on the GQA benchmark dataset and show that it can effectively encode natural images, achieving competitive performance to state-of-the-art deep learning methods for zero-shot VQA.0

VSA4VQA: Scaling A Vector Symbolic Architecture To Visual Question Answering on Natural Images

To fully understand human memory, it is necessary to understand its lifespan development. However, memory assessments often rely on significantly different methodologies for different age groups, and their results are typically not directly comparable. In this paper, we present a quantitative assessment of memory function spanning an age range of five to 85 years that is based on a model-based memory assessment. This approach yields a uniform metric that is directly interpretable and can be compared across different tasks and materials that are appropriate for different age groups. The results show a robust U-shape function, with long-term memory function at age 5 being comparable to that of cognitively impaired elderly individuals. These results and the method utilized could provide a new foundation for future studies on memory development across life stages.0

Model-Based Characterization of Forgetting in Children and Across The Lifespan

Spontaneous recovery of fear after extinction is a well-established behavioral phenomenon. Different theories in psychology account for spontaneous recovery by proposing that it may result from temporal weighting, reduced processing of stimuli over time, enhanced salience of adverse events or return of the acquisition context. We propose a novel mechanism of spontaneous recovery: selective maintenance of adverse events, and ground this mechanism in a computational model of latent cause inference. To investigate the proposed mechanism, we collected behavioral data with an aversive conditioning and extinction task (N=280) and fit the data with computational models formalizing our and others’ theories. Quantitative and qualitative model comparisons indicated that selective maintenance of adverse events accounts for spontaneous recovery better than alternative theories. As spontaneous recovery of fear after extinction can serve as a model of relapse after exposure therapy, we use this mechanistic understanding of spontaneous recovery to propose and simulate the effect of add-on interventions to prevent relapse after exposure therapy.0

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False Memories of Actions: When Motor Simulation is Deceptive

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