Netherlands

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 &amp; 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

CogSci 2024

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

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 
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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!

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**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.

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

poster

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

Does active learning lead to better teaching of novel perceptual categories?

Implicit attitudes are often defined as residing beyond conscious awareness. This definition has been challenged by robust evidence demonstrating highly accurate predictions of implicit attitudes. However, relevant tests have all been conducted using well-known targets (e.g., racial groups), about which participants possess ample relevant knowledge. Therefore, accurate predictions may have emerged from inferential mechanisms rather than privileged first-person awareness. Here we probe participants’ (N = 4,448) ability to report their own experimentally created implicit attitudes across four studies where implicit attitudes and their explicit counterparts (representing an obvious source of inference) were manipulated to shift in opposite directions. Predicted and actual implicit attitudes were either unrelated to each other, or predictive accuracy was limited to participants whose implicit and explicit attitudes were aligned. Echoing classic and contemporary accounts, these data suggest that implicit attitudes are (largely) unconscious, and successful implicit attitude predictions are likely subserved by inference rather than introspection.

**Authors:**

Benedek Kurdi: University of Illinois; David Melnikoff: Stanford University; Adam Morris: Princeton University

Awareness of Experimentally Created Implicit Attitudes: Large-Scale Tests in Three Paradigms

The present study examines the effects of novelty seeking (NS) personality trait on the undervaluation of product creativity, specifically the tendency to undervalue the usefulness of novel ideas or products, a bias termed “usefulness undervaluation bias”. Creativity is defined by novelty and usefulness, and it has been reported that there is a bias to undervalue the usefulness of novel creations due to uncertainty in judging it. In this study, two studies were conducted to determine whether individuals with high NS are reduced in this bias. Study 1 confirmed that individuals with higher NS rated creativity more positively, consistent with previous findings on openness to experience. Study 2 showed that raters with higher NS were less likely to underrate the usefulness of novel products, suggesting that NS moderates the relationship between perceived novelty and usefulness. These findings indicate that personality trait, especially NS, play an important role in
creativity evaluation.

**Authors:**

Eline Aya Hattori: Nagoya University; Mayu Yamakawa: Nagoya University; Kazuhisa Miwa: Nagoya University

Moderating Effect of Novelty Seeking Trait on the Usefulness Undervaluation Bias in Creative Products Evaluation

Classical approaches to studying insight problem-solving typically use specialized problems (e.g., nine-dot problem, compound-remote
associates task) as stimuli together with verbal reports from subjects during problem-solving to reveal their thought processes, possibly adding other task-related metrics such as completion rate and physiological measures like eye fixation and neural activity. Thisapproach has led to the claims that insight and creative thought require impasse and mental restructuring. What is missing from this literature is a cognitive process model of insight, and onereason for the lack of such a model is the lack of a unified, scalable, and tunable experimental framework with which to study human creative problem-solving with higher fidelity. In this paper, we introduce ESCAPE, an experimental paradigm using puzzle video games as stimuli which allow for the collection of process data that can serve as a basis for computational models. We have specifically developed a set of puzzle games based on this paradigm and conducted experiments that demonstrate the utility of the approach by revealing a set ofcomputational principles that need to be accounted for by a theory of creative problems and the computational models based on it.

**Authors:**

Vasanth Sarathy: Tufts University; Nicholas Rabb: Tufts University; Daniel M Kasenberg: Tufts University; Matthias Scheutz: Tufts University

Using Puzzle Video Games to Study Cognitive Processes in Human Insight and Creative Problem-Solving

Recent decision making theories have explained behaviour using mental sampling mechanisms where people imagine possible outcomes to guide their choices. Simultaneously, work in other domains has found evidence of particular mental sampling patterns, such as autocorrelations between samples and moderation by prior assumptions, which current decision making theories do not generally consider. Here, we seek to unify this work, developing a new sampling model of preferential choice incorporating these findings in other domains. Our model, based on the Autocorrelated Bayesian Sampler, predicts choice, reaction time, confidence and valuation from a common underlying process. We find a strong correspondence between our model’s predictions and empirical choice data, though performance remains below leading explanations for such tasks. Our model does however cover a broader set of response types than existing theories, suggesting the advantages of considering of a wider range of behaviours than are commonly examined in current decision making studies.

**Authors:**

Jake Spicer: University of Warwick; Yun-Xiao Li: University of Warwick; Lucas Castillo: University of Warwick; Johanna Falben: University of Amsterdam; Cheng Stella Qian: Psychology; Jian-Qiao Zhu: Princeton University; Nick Chater: University of Warwick; Adam Sanborn: University of Warwick

Mental Sampling in Preferential Choice: Specifying the Sampling Algorithm

Recent research (e.g., Burns & Krygier, 2015; Chi & Burns, 2022) demonstrated that people could exhibit a strong bias towards the smaller first digits, which is consistent with the pattern predicted by Benford’s law. However, this psychological phenomenon was predominantly observed when generating meaningful numbers for decision-making. We investigated explanations rooted in the statistical acquisition of distributional information and the impact of anchoring during number estimation. Undergraduate students were asked to estimate the weight, lifespan and group-size of animals after learning different distributions of these variables, supplied with an anchored value, either an average or a starting point, for reference. The Benford bias reasonably emerged regardless of the variable distribution, yet was strongly influenced by the anchored information. Notably, showing average values significantly suppressed Benford bias. These findings offered insights into the cognitive process of number estimation in the presence of statistical evidence and anchored information.

**Authors:**

Duyi Chi: The Univerisity of Sydney; Bruce Burns: The University of Sydney

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