Netherlands

Children are keen explorers of the world: They systematically explore surprising findings and test hypotheses during play. However, less is known about whether toddlers are similarly driven to learn about the self. Here, we ask whether toddlers are intrinsically motivated to explore their own competence. In ongoing work, 2-year-olds (N = 12) play Montessori practical life games along with their parents; toys were verified to be equally appealing and challenging to toddlers in an independent norming experiment (N = 14). Within each pair, parents guide toddler’s hands while playing with one toy, which provides ambiguous information about the toddler’s competence, and take turns playing with the other toy independently, which provides unambiguous information. Toddlers are then offered both toys to freely explore independently. Preliminary results show that toddlers explored the ambiguous toy first in 71% of the 31 trials, suggesting that toddlers seek out opportunities to learn about their competence.

**Authors:**

Bella Fascendini: Princeton University; Bonan Zhao: Princeton University; Natalia A Vélez: Princeton University

CogSci 2024

Are toddlers intrinsically motivated to explore their own competence?

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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#### About

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.

#### Our History 

* **Society Creation**<br>
The Society was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts in 1979. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. 
<br><br>
* **Conference Creation**<br>
The first conference on cognitive science was held at La Jolla, California in August, 1979, and has occurred annually since then. The proceedings of each conference are published, and those from most years are available through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The annual proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference represent a major source of information on new work and new ideas in the scientific study of thinking. In 1990, the Society, with help from an anonymous donor, established the David Marr Prize for the best student paper at each annual meeting.
<br><br>
* **Journal Creation**<br>
The Journal, Cognitive Science, began publication in 1976, and is now published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Executive Editor is currently Richard P. Cooper of Birkbeck, University of London, and there are 18 Associate Editors and a 30-member editorial board. It serves as the premier outlet for research reports that intersect two or more disciplines. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society. The Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society voted in late 2006 to found a new journal, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). The Editor in Chief is Wayne Gray, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The journal seeks to fill a niche not occupied by Cognitive Science Journal or other cognitive science journals. Membership in the Society includes a subscription to Cognitive Science and TopiCS. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society.
<br><br>

#### Code of Conduct

By attending the CogSci 2025 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s **[Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ChPuihLy6jE_BWqfO7J2KKgX35JW2zsM/view?usp=sharing)**.
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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

poster

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**<br>
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**<br>
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)<br>
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)<br>
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
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)<br>

**Friday, July 26**<br>
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)<br>
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration)<br>
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
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)<br>

**Saturday, July 27**<br>
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)<br>
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture)<br>


#### **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**<br>
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**<br>
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.

Previous work has found that when adults are asked for "the first thing that comes to mind", they will provide something that falls between the descriptive average and the prescriptive ideal. In two experiments, we tested whether children would also be influenced by prescriptive information in their first-to-mind judgments, but also when they were asked to predict a randomly sampled item. In Experiment 1, providing information about whether being longer or shorter made a fictional tool better or worse led children to provide judgments that were biased toward the prescriptively 'best' tool, regardless of what they were asked for, while adults ignored prescriptive information when asked for a random sample. Experiment 2 replicated this result but further showed that the effect was specifically driven by information about which objects were prescriptively good, and did not also arise when the only salient information was about which objects were prescriptively bad.

**Authors:**

Jonathan F. Kominsky: Central European University; Joshua Knobe: Yale University; Elizabeth Bonawitz: Harvard Graduate School of Education

Children use positive prescriptive information when asked to predict random samples

Cognitive development has been hypothesised to be stagelike between the ages of 5-8 years (e.g., Piaget). Yet, cognition varies from moment to moment, in every task, for every child. Studies have demonstrated that cognitive variability is non-trivial, non-random, and meaningful, but attempts for systematic and large-scale longitudinal measurements of cognitive variability have scarcely been undertaken. 
This project’s goal is to create a more detailed empirical record and dynamical account of intra-individual variability in cognitive development of children. We aim to do this with a 3-year longitudinal and multimodal data collection starting at 5 years of age. Half-yearly measurements will be complemented with periods of daily measurements. Our ultimate aim is to build a variability corpus in which we can study variability patterns and developmental transitions, and to connect our findings to “Piaget’s new theory”. Our poster will present our methodology and results from a pilot study.

**Authors:**

Marije B. ten Den: University of Groningen; Lisette De Jonge-Hoekstra: University of Groningen; Marijn van Dijk: University of Groningen; Jeremy Trevelyan Burman PhD: University of Groningen; Ralf F.A. Cox: University of Groningen

Not stages, but variability ranges? Cognitive variability bridging complexity science and 'Piaget's new theory'

Recent evidence suggests that infants interpret giving as indicative of a relationship based on long-term balance. Such a relational model should induce the tracking of the participating agents as individuals irrespective of the temporary role they occupy, as these are expected to alternate over time in reciprocal fashion. We tested this hypothesis in a label-mapping paradigm by examining whether 14-month-old infants interpreted a trained label as referring to the individual pointed at or the action role it occupied within a giving event. Across four eye-tracking experiments, we found systematic evidence for the first interpretation. Tellingly, no consistent mapping was produced when infants were familiarized with object-displacing actions not resulting in a social transfer (i.e., disposing). Such an early propensity to map labels onto identity-preserving information over transitory action roles supports the hypothesis that infants conceptualize the participants of a giving event as individuals reciprocating acts of transfer over time.

**Authors:**

Denis Tatone: Central European University; Gergely Csibra: Central European University; Jun Yin: Ningbo University

The observation of giving induces infants to track individuals

Children learn words that name objects (“ball”) and those that name abstract concepts (“story”). One view of learning is that different inputs matter for different words (Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004). That is, many argue that although the observational contexts in which words occur are sufficient for learning object names, they are not for learning abstract “hard words” (Gleitman et al., 2005). This study revisited the contributions of observational contexts to learning one type of hard word: nouns denoting non-basic level object categories (“hard nouns” like “friend”; Kako, 2005). In a new artificial learning paradigm, we reveal that although observational contexts were insufficient for full hard noun learning, they afforded learners partial knowledge that allowed them to succeed in some learning tasks. These data highlight how observational contexts may lay the foundation for learning hard nouns, and underscore how definitions of learning impact our understanding of how the input shapes it.

**Authors:**

Kosta Boskovic: University of Connecticut; Sumarga H. Suanda: University of Connecticut

Revisiting the Role of Observational Contexts for Learning Hard Nouns

Although even infants appear to consider multiple possibilities, preschoolers often fail tasks that require reasoning about mutually exclusive alternatives. We review two explanations for this failure: (1) children have a minimal representation of possibility (Leahy & Carey, 2020), and simulate a single outcome when faced with multiple possibilities; (2) children are able to consider alternative possibilities, but their tendency to engage in exploratory behavior to resolve uncertainty might drive these apparent failures. To test these hypotheses, we assessed 3- and 4-year-olds on a novel search task. Here, children searched for an object that was dropped from either a fully transparent (one necessary location) or opaque (two possible locations) set of Y-shaped tubes. In Exp. 1, we found that children spent less time searching the first location when both search locations were possible candidates. Exp. 2 (ongoing) replicates these results in a context that does not require manual search.

**Authors:**

Luisa Andreuccioli: University of California San Diego; Sophie Mazor: University of California, San Diego; Katarina Begus: University of Copenhagen; Elizabeth Bonawitz: Harvard University; Stephanie Denison: University of Waterloo ; Caren M. Walker: University of California San Diego

Young children adapt their search behavior for necessary versus merely possible outcomes

Gender stereotypes are early-emerging and harmful for young children. However, it is unclear if and when children expect other people to hold gender stereotypes, especially if children themselves hold different beliefs. Across two preregistered experiments (total n=275), we measured 5- to 7-year-olds’ predictions for which activity (an engineering game or story game) a teacher would give to a boy or girl student. Critically, in our study, participants always knew the students’ true interests, while teachers sometimes knew and sometimes did not. Experiment 1 showed that 5- to 7-year-olds are sensitive to whether the teacher knows or is ignorant about the students’ interests. Critically, in Experiment 2, we found that 6- and7-year-olds predicted that teachers would give students stereotypical games (e.g., engineering game for boys, and the story game for girls), even though participants knew that the students would be happy with either game. Thus, by the time children enter school, they think that adults hold gender stereotypes even if they themselves do not, which could have negative consequences for children’s learning.

**Authors:**

Mika Asaba: Yale University; Marianna Y. Zhang: Stanford University; Julia Anne Leonard: Yale University

Children’s representations of adults' gender stereotypes

Human bodies follow similar designs. Yet, languages differ in how they divide the body into parts to name them (Brown 1976; Enfield et al. 2006; Majid et al. 2015; Huisman et al. 2021). In this study, we investigate the similarities and differences in naming two separate body parts with the same word, i.e., colexifications. Using a computational approach, we analyze networks of body part vocabularies across 1,028 languages. The analyses focus on the influence of perceptual features that lead to variations in body part colexification networks and on a comparison of network structures in different semantic domains. Results reveal that adjacent body parts are frequently colexified, while variations in vocabularies are influenced by perceptual features like shape and function. Compared to semantic domains like emotion and color, body part colexification networks show less variation across language families. This research presents the first large-scale comparison of body part vocabularies and provides important insights into the variability of a universal human domain.

**Authors:**

Annika Tjuka: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Cross-Cultural Insights into Body Part Naming

Selective attention to predictive cues is often considered an efficient way to address the exploration-exploitation dilemma in decision-making. Yet in some circumstances, it can also lead to sub-optimal decision-making due to false beliefs about the environment acquired early in learning - a learning trap. In this study, we examined the relationship between attention selectivity and the emergence of a one-dimensional learning trap in a multidimensional categorization learning task. Combining empirical work (N=75) and computational modeling, we find that more selective attention, especially in the early phase of learning, increases the likelihood that an individual will fall into a learning trap. This finding sheds light on the causal role of attentional biases in the way that individuals explore and learn about choice-options.

**Authors:**

Yanjun Liu: University of New South Wales; Ben Newell: University of New South Wales; Jaimie E Lee: University of New South Wales ; Brett Hayes: University of New South Wales

Examining the Relationship Between Selective Attention and the Formation of Learning Traps

Objects in the world are represented at multiple hierarchical levels of abstraction. For example, you can identify a four-legged creature as an animal, or a dog, or specifically as a Cocker Spaniel. While there has been extensive work examining the relationships between hierarchical category levels, it is unclear how such representations interact during categorization. That is, do individuals process category levels serially or are category levels processed in parallel during categorization? Here, we had participants learn categorization rules for four categories of novel creatures. We examined patterns of errors that participants made in a forced response task, where we manipulated the amount of time participants had to make responses on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results indicate that participants process task levels in parallel, rather than serially resolving superordinate task levels before subordinate levels. Parallel processing of category levels could underpin the remarkable flexibility with which we access category information.

**Authors:**

Juliana E. Trach: Yale University; Samuel David McDougle: Yale Univeristy

Rapid parallel processing dynamics during hierarchical category decisions

To be efficient, both active learners and teachers need to be able to judge the relative usefulness of a piece of information for themselves or for their students, respectively. The current study assessed whether experience of active learning facilitates subsequent teaching from imperfect knowledge. Following a visual category learning task, dyads (N=40) of active and yoked passive learners taught (imagined) naive learners how to categorize the same visual stimuli by providing them with a small number of self-generated examples. Active learners narrowed down the possible categorization boundaries more than yoked learners. However, the active learning advantage was modest and limited to categories that were more difficult to learn and, overall, teachers were overly conservative, providing the least ambiguous category examples.

**Authors:**

Oana Stanciu: Central European University; Jozsef Fiser: Central European University

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