Netherlands

When children solve cognitive problems together, they coordinate their speech, hand movements and head movements. Previous studies with adults have shown that such multimodal coordination is related to better collaboration. We do not know whether this is true for children, however. In this study, dyads of children (6-10 years) discussed and solved balance scale problems together. To investigate children’s multimodal coordination, we measured their speech, hand movements and head movements throughout their bouts of discussion, and applied multidimensional Recurrence Quantification Analysis (MdRQA) on these timeseries. We coded the type of collaboration the children engaged in during these bouts of discussion. We measured performance regarding predicting to which side the balance scale would tilt. We will analyse how children’s multimodal coordination is related to the type of collaboration and to their performance on the balance scale problems. Our results will show how successful collaboration between children emerges from their multimodal coordination.

**Authors:**

Lisette De Jonge-Hoekstra: Psychology, Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Groningen; Wim Pouw: Radboud University; Steffie van der Steen: Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Groningen; Ralf F.A. Cox: University of Groningen; James Dixon: University of Connecticut

CogSci 2024

Children&#39;s multimodal coordination during collaborative problem solving

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) 
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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 
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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

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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.

Children's multimodal coordination during collaborative problem solving

poster

Trained on text only, Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a unique way to approach the age-old question of how language captures sensory experiences. Such models have showcased human-level performance in several domains. However, what they capture about the sensory world remains uncertain. We prompted state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) as well as sighted and congenitally blind adults to judge the likelihood of successful visual and auditory perception using verbal scenarios. Scenarios varied in distance of the observer from the object (next to, across the street, a block away), duration of perception (glance vs. stare) and properties of perceived object (e.g., size for vision). Sighted and blind humans produced highly consistent perceptibility judgments, and these correlated highly with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. GPT-4 showed human-like effects of size, distance, and duration, though both LLMs underestimated humans’ ability to perceive. Language captures detailed quantitative information about perceptibility.

**Authors:**

Akshi LNU: Johns Hopkins University; Gabriel Pernell: Johns Hopkins University; Ziwen Wang: Johns Hopkins University; Marina Bedny: Johns Hopkins University

Language captures rich information about perceptibility: Evidence from LMMs and humans

According to prominent accounts of early action understanding, infants’ interpretation of others’ actions is undergirded by an assumption of utility maximization. However, it is unclear whether this assumption applies only to selection among actions or also to selection among goals. Here, using an eye-tracking paradigm, we investigated whether 14- to 16-month-old infants would predict an agent to choose a lower-cost option when faced with two identical outcomes that could be reached at different costs. Infants directed more looks to the lower-cost option, and this effect was not merely due to visual saliency. These findings corroborate the proposal that infants rely on utility maximization when reasoning about an agent’s likely goal and provide evidence of an early ability to represent and compare alternatives in the context of goal attribution.

**Authors:**

Laura Schlingloff-Nemecz: Central European University; Gergely Csibra: Central European University; Denis Tatone: Central European University; Barbara Pomiechowska: University of Birmingham

Infants expect an agent to choose a goal that can be reached at a lower cost

Children learn a lot from others, but the effectiveness of their social learning depends on the reliability of others' help. How do children adapt their future learning decisions based on the past reliability of receiving help? In two experiments, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 60 each) interacted with a researcher who either followed through on promised help (Reliable condition) or failed to do so (Unreliable condition). Compared to children in the Reliable condition, those in the Unreliable condition were more likely to forego a harder but more rewarding puzzle as their next task and choose an easier, less rewarding puzzle instead. These decisions, while seemingly maladaptive at face value, reflect an adaptive response to the low likelihood of receiving help. These results extend our understanding of social learning across diverse ecological contexts, with broader implications to support education for children in less responsive environments.

**Authors:**

Katherine Adams Shannon: Stanford University; Aneesa Conine-Nakano: Stanford University; Willem E. Frankenhuis: University of Amsterdam; Michael C. Frank: Stanford University; Hyowon Gweon: Stanford University

Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners

How does the brain control attention? The Attention Schema Theory suggests that the brain constructs an internal model of attention for its control. However, it remains unclear under which circumstances an attention schema is computationally useful, and whether it can emerge in a learning system without hard-wiring it. To address these questions, we trained a reinforcement learning agent with attention to track and catch a ball in a noisy environment. Crucially, the agent had additional neural resources that it could freely use. We asked under which conditions these additional resources develop an attention schema to track attention. We found that the more uncertain the agent was about the location of its attentional state, the more it benefited from these additional resources, which developed an attention schema. Together, these results indicate that an attention schema emerges in simple learning systems where attention is both important and difficult to track.

**Authors:**

Lotta Marlen Piefke: University Osnabrück; Adrien Doerig: University of Osnabrück; Tim Kietzmann: University of Osnabrück; Sushrut Thorat: Osnabrück University

Computational characterization of the role of an attention schema in controlling visuospatial attention

Our remarkable ability to infer complex cause-effect relationships is thought to distinguish humans from all other species. Despite that causal inferencing pervades human cognition, it remains unclear whether this fundamental cognitive ability is supported by a unified, domain-general mechanism or multiple domain-specific mechanisms. Both the language and logical reasoning systems have been described as possible unified substrates of causal inferencing. The current study uses neuroimaging to offer insight into this debate. We specifically focus on the culturally universal and highly motivationally relevant case of inferring illness causes. Participants read causal and noncausal vignettes about illness and mechanical failure while undergoing fMRI. We find that inferring the causes of illness selectively activates the brain’s ‘animacy network’, particularly the precuneus. By contrast, a domain-general (i.e., content-invariant) preference for causal inferencing did not emerge, including in the language and logical reasoning networks. Together, this evidence suggests that domain-specific mechanisms enable causal inferencing.

**Authors:**

Miriam Hauptman: Johns Hopkins University; Marina Bedny: Johns Hopkins University

Causal inferencing relies on domain-specific systems: Evidence from illness causality

Imbalances between the brain’s excitatory (E) and inhibitory (I) systems can lead to structural and functional cortical deviances which have been associated with various developmental conditions including autism. However, the developmental trajectory of such EI imbalances across childhood and adolescence as well as its relationship to autism traits is not well understood yet. In this study, we determined a functional measure of the EI balance from resting-state electroencephalogram recordings of 92 autistic and 100 allistic children (6-17 years of age) and related it to behavioral assessments of autism traits and language ability. Our results revealed differential EI trajectories for the autistic compared to the allistic children. Moreover, the EI trajectories related to individual language ability in which elevated excitability in late childhood and early adolescence was linked to decreased listening comprehension. Our findings therefore show that the developmental trajectory of EI balance shares variance with autism trait development.

**Authors:**

Hannah Plueckebaum: University of Kaiserslautern-Landau; Lars Meyer: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences; Ann-Kathrin Beck: University of Kaiserslautern-Landau; Thomas Lachmann: University of Kaiserslautern-Landau; Katharina H. Menn: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain  Sciences

The trajectory of the functional excitation-inhibition balance in an autistic and allistic developmental sample

Age-related memory decline is a multifaceted and heterogeneous process. Previous studies on working memory and episodic memory have demonstrated that older participants’ memory for spatial item-context bindings drops dramatically, while it is relatively preserved for individual items. Here, we extend this research in two ways: first, we study memory for spatial context not for individual items, but for ordered item sequences, second, we investigate how blocked versus interleaved learning curricula affect item, order and context memory for older versus younger adults. Across two behavioral experiments with 108 younger (18-35 years) and 100 older (over 65 years) adults, we find better memory for item sequences than position sequences and worst performance for combined item-position sequence reports in both age-groups. Notably, age differences followed the same pattern, being least pronounced for sequential item memory and most for combined item-position sequences. Changing the learning curriculum such that either spatial or item sequences repeated across times, rather than occurring in an interleaved fashion, improved memory performance in both age groups, but had a stronger effect on older than younger adults, suggesting that blocked learning curricula can help older adults with reallocation of limited cognitive resources.

**Authors:**

Xiangjuan Ren: Universität Hamburg; Marit Petzka: Universität Hamburg; Nicolas Schuck: Universität Hamburg

Blocked learning curriculum reduces age-related deficits in memory

Social identity and situational information guide how people morally judge others. A journalist is judged differently than a doctor if they expose private information, which may also depend on whether the reason was to prevent a public health crisis vs. for monetary gain. What is less known, is how people decide how much and what type of information (identity vs. situation) is more relevant for them to make a moral judgment. To investigate this, participants received partial information about a case where an agent committed a moral violation. Then, participants could choose whether to incur a cost to get new pieces of information, or to stop collecting information and instead judge the agent’s actions. This study elucidates how people accumulate and use evidence to judge others. Our findings can reveal underlying biases in decision-making and be used to inform legal and criminal proceedings, news coverage strategies, and others.

**Authors:**

Deborah Cesarini: Duke University; Jade Terry: Duke University

How Does Information Sampling Affect Moral Judgments?

Cognitive graphs represent relationships of learned associations between items or concepts, such as social relationships within a friend group or a network of streets. It is unknown what properties of graphs affect the ability of individuals to mentally represent and navigate these structures. Primary candidates are 1. the number of states (nodes) within a graph, 2. the number of connections among states (edges), and 3. community structure. We independently manipulate these factors to examine how they affect both the ability to identify paths between nodes and the efficiency of paths chosen in abstract graphs (associative networks) of object pictures with no overt spatial properties. Consistent with our hypotheses that changes in graph size, edge number, and community structure impact learning, we observed that these factors affected accuracy and efficiency in reaching targets. The findings demonstrate the influence of graph structure on learning, with implications for both spatial and non-spatial graphs.

**Authors:**

Theodoros Kapogianis: UCI; Aaron Bornstein: University of California, Irvine; Elizabeth Chrastil: UC Irvine

Size and community structure affect abstract graph learning

Peripersonal space (PPS) is the multisensory representation of the near-body space. Several factors modulate PPS size and the sharpness of the boundary separating PPS and the far extrapersonal space, suggesting that PPS may be involved in the subjective experience and in the self-other representation. Such representations seem to be shaped by mindfulness meditation (MM); however, evidence on the effects of MM on PPS is limited. To test the hypothesis that MM modulates both PPS size and the sharpness of PPS boundary, we enrolled 26 non-meditators, who performed an audio-tactile task before and after a 15-minute guided focused attention meditation (FAM). Despite no changes of PPS size, after FAM we found a significantly reduced sharpness of PPS boundary, as if it dissolved. We suggest that the reduced separation between the self and the environment, reported by meditators in some phenomenological studies, may relate to the altered PPS sharpness.

**Authors:**

Riccardo De Pastina: Sapienza University of Rome; Salvatore Gaetano Chiarella: Sapienza University of Rome; Antonino Raffone: Sapienza University of Rome; Luca Simione: Università degli Studi Internazionali

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