Netherlands

The ability to predict and understand other people&#39;s actions is critical for real-world social behavior. Here we hypothesized that representations of social roles (e.g., cashier, mechanic, doctor) enable people to build rapid expectations about what others know and how they might act. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we show that role representations support real time expectations about how other people might act (Study 1) and the knowledge they might possess (Study 2). Moreover, people reported more surprisal when the events deviated from role expectations, and they were more likely to misremember what happened. Our results suggest that roles are a powerful route for social understanding that has been previously understudied in social cognition.

**Authors:**

Aaron Baker: Yale University; Yarrow Dunham: Yale University; Julian Jara-Ettinger: Yale University

CogSci 2024

Roles guide rapid inferences about agent knowledge and behavior

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**
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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** 
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.

The ability to predict and understand other people's actions is critical for real-world social behavior. Here we hypothesized that representations of social roles (e.g., cashier, mechanic, doctor) enable people to build rapid expectations about what others know and how they might act. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we show that role representations support real time expectations about how other people might act (Study 1) and the knowledge they might possess (Study 2). Moreover, people reported more surprisal when the events deviated from role expectations, and they were more likely to misremember what happened. Our results suggest that roles are a powerful route for social understanding that has been previously understudied in social cognition.

**Authors:**

Aaron Baker: Yale University; Yarrow Dunham: Yale University; Julian Jara-Ettinger: Yale University

poster

Minds interact with the environment across multiple time scales. Cognition in the moment requires dynamic adjustment of sensory and motor processes in response to changing environmental input: we update our visual attention, recalculate the strength of our grasp, and navigate new landscapes. Cognition is also sensitive to the pattern of our experiences over weeks to months, as we explore and build memories. We accumulate information about our environments throughout life, with early experiences playing an especially formative role in our beliefs about the stability of our resources and relationships.

**Authors:**

Kenji Doya, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University; Alex Clarke, University of Cambridge; Willem Frankenhuis, University of Amsterdam

Dynamics Between Minds & the Environment

Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4 (OpenAI et al., 2023), or Google’s PaLM (Chowdhery et al., 2022) generate text responses to user-generated text prompts.  In contrast to work that evaluates  the extent to which model-generated text coheres with linguistic rules (i.e., formal competence) (Chomsky et al., 2023; Piantadosi, 2023), the present symposium discusses the  work of cognitive scientists aimed at assessing the extent and manner in which LLMs show effective understanding, reasoning and decision making, capacities associated with human higher cognition (i.e., functional competence) (Binz & Schulz, 2023; Mahowald et al., 2023; Webb et al., 2023). Given both their expertise and their interest in clarifying the nature of human thinking, cognitive scientists are in a unique position both to carefully evaluate LLMs’ capacity for thought (Bhatia, 2023; Han et al., 2024; Mitchell, 2023) and to benefit from them as methodological and theoretical tools. This symposium will thus be of interest not only to cognitive scientists concerned with machine intelligence, but also to those looking to incorporate advances in artificial intelligence with their study of human intelligence.

**Authors:**

Nicholas Ichien: University of Pennsylvania; Sudeep Bhatia: University of Pennsylvania; Anna Ivanova: Georgia Institute of Technology; Taylor Webb: University of California, Los Angeles; Tom Griffiths: Princeton University ; Marcel Binz: Helmholtz Computational Health Center

Higher cognition in large language models

Alongside the linguistic input, young children leverage multimodal cues (e.g., prosody, gestures) to learn novel words in face-to-face interactions. It is unclear whether multimodal cues play a similar role in adults. Here, we used ECOLANG, a corpus of semi-naturalistic dyadic conversations where English-speaking adults incidentally learned about unknown objects and their names by interacting with a partner who knew those objects. We examined whether multimodal cues (prosodic, indexical, and iconic) predicted learners’ ability to learn the objects’ names, above and beyond individual differences and linguistic predictors. We found that the number of repetitions of the label predicted word learning. Additionally, learners with lower working memory abilities benefited from speakers producing representational gestures while labelling the unknown objects. We discuss implications for theories of word learning and approaches of situated cognition.

**Authors:**

Francesco Cabiddu: University College London; Christopher Edwards: University College London; Harriet Hill-Payne: University College London; Ed Donnellan: University of Warwick; Yan Gu: University of Essex; Gabriella Vigliocco: University College London

What Predicts Adult Word Learning in Naturalistic Interactions? A Corpus Study

People who have no experience with programming can create informal programs to rearrange the order of cars in trains. To find out whether they rely on kinematic mental simulations, the current studies examined participants’ eye movements in two experiments in which participants performed various moves and rearrangements on a railway consisting of a main track running from left to right and a siding entered from and exited to the left track.  In Experiment 1, they had to imagine different sorts of single moves of cars on the railway. The sequences of their fixations resembled iconic gestures: they tended to look at the starting location of the imagined move, and then at its final location. In Experiment 2, the task was to create descriptions of how to solve four sorts of rearrangements that differ in their Kolmogorov complexity.  It predicted the time to find the correct solution and the relative number and duration of fixations recorded during the description of each move for rearrangements of different complexity. Participants were more likely to fixate on the symbols on the cars than anything else, and they fixated longer when the rearrangement was more difficult. They also tended to fixate regions of the tracks where a car’s movement began or ended, as if they were imagining a car moving along the tracks. The results suggest that humans rely on a kinematic mental simulation when creating informal algorithms.

**Authors:**

Robert Mackiewicz: SWPS University of Social Science and Humanities; Monica Bucciarelli: Università di Torino; Sangeet Khemlani: Naval Research Laboratory; Phil Johnson-Laird: Princeton University

Eye Movements are like Gestures in the Creation of Informal Algorithms

The study focuses on the mechanisms through which dance brings people together. We recorded 7 improvised dance duets and asked 5 skilled improvisers to rate the perceived togetherness in the recorded dances. Subsequently, we employed pose tracking techniques and developed a quantitative measure of the stability of interpersonal movement coordination between dancers, demonstrating that it strongly correlates with experts' togetherness ratings. Based on follow-up interviews, we revealed that experts' understanding of togetherness converges to a stable construct, involving a state of responsive, mindful attention. This construct can be grounded in the objective properties of movement coordination. These properties can be framed within the context of dynamical systems, suggesting potential systemic organization principles, such as moment-to-moment adaptation, that promote togetherness. Our mixed-methods research has implications for various fields, including psychology, cognitive science, and art studies.

**Authors:**

Julian Zubek: University of Warsaw; Klara Łucznik: University of Warsaw

Movement coordination as a measure of togetherness in improvised dance duets

People thinking creatively will shift their bodies, wander around, move. Why? Here we investigate one explanation: Movement is a canny strategy for changing the information that is available visually, in ways that facilitate insight. We first analyzed video footage of mathematicians engrossed in creative thought. We found that sudden "aha" insights were reliably preceded by movements away far from the blackboard, as if mathematicians were stepping back to "see the big picture." To confirm the causal impact of changing proximity on creativity, we conducted an experiment that manipulated proximity to a whiteboard while participants worked on insight puzzles represented by diagrams. Participants had greater creative success when they could survey the entire whiteboard from a distance. Whether in real-world expert reasoning or a controlled experiment, movements away and toward visual representations facilitated insight. Wandering is sometimes a kind of epistemic action, facilitating the discovery of novel connections.

**Authors:**

Shadab Tabatabaeian: University of California Merced; Alyssa Viviana Ortega: University of California, Merced; Artemisia O'bi: -; David Landy: Indiana University, Bloomington; Tyler Marghetis: University of California, Merced

Stepping back to see the connection: Movement during problem solving facilitates creative insight

Collaboration takes place everywhere in everyday life, and exposure to the ideas of others is a core process in collaboration. In this study, we investigated whether exposure to other people's ideas facilitates idea generation: 123 participants were asked to list as many ideas as possible to increase turnout in one of three conditions: constant exposure, intermittent exposure, or no exposure. Participants in the no exposure condition generated ideas without exposure to other's ideas. In the constant exposure condition, one of the sets of ideas generated by participants in the no exposure condition was presented on every trial. In the intermittent exposure condition, ideas were only presented in trials 1, 4, and 7. As a result, there was no significant difference in the number of ideas generated between conditions. The conditions under which exposure to the ideas of others facilitates idea generation were discussed.

**Authors:**

Sachiko Kiyokawa: The University of Tokyo

Exposure to the ideas of others in idea generation

Facilitating and countering the spread of true and false health information, respectively, has become an important role for expert organisations on social media. However, it remains unclear the extent to which exposure to expert opinion can influence people’s belief in health claims relative to exposure to non-expert opinion. It is possible that people may make different assumptions about the dependence of shared opinions from expert versus non-expert sources, which differentially impacts the effect of increasing consensus quantity. To explore how people think about expertise and source dependency, we simulate a naïve learner who makes a simple assumption about the generative process behind the information they encounter: that expert sources draw upon a larger sample of evidence than non-expert sources to inform their public statements. We test the qualitative prediction of this simulation by presenting people with a series of short messages via a mock Twitter interface, and varying the number of sources and source expertise from trial to trial. Consistent with the simulation, we found tentative evidence that expert sources were more persuasive than non-expert sources but that the incremental effect of viewing messages from additional experts plateaued faster than non-experts. Implications for these findings include better understanding the role that consensus plays in shifting belief in health claims, and the role that experts can play in aiding online reasoning.

**Authors:**

Benjamin P Simmonds: The University of Adelaide; Keith James Ransom: University of Adelaide; Rachel Stephens: University of Adelaide 

Navigating Health Claims on Social Media: Reasoning from Consensus Quantity and Expertise

When people perform generous acts for each other, they can balance out relative benefits by alternating who is generous. When and why they do this? Prior research has considered three main motivations for generous acts: increasing one's own long-run benefit (e.g from reciprocation and reputation), increasing the recipient's benefit, and reducing inequality. Here we test the relative importance of a distinct motivation: to communicate about a desired social relationship. We find that people selectively expect alternating generous acts in equal relationships, use alternating actions to infer the presence of an equal relationship, and critically expect that people alternate generosity in order to communicate desire for a (more) equal relationship. In a formal planning model, increasing the value of communicating desired equality increases the likelihood of reciprocal generosity.

**Authors:**

Alicia M Chen: MIT; Rebecca Saxe: MIT

How taking turns communicates desired equality in social relationships

In social network research, free recall name generators are central tools for measuring individuals’ perceptions of their social relationships. This study addresses the patterns that individuals exhibit when recalling their social relationships. Specifically, it examines the influence of social contexts, groups, and demographic factors on the order and relative sequences in which individuals are named. By analyzing responses of a friendship name generator in a longitudinal dataset of over 1000 students from the Swiss StudentLife study, we aim to shed light on the cognitive patterns that govern the recall of social bonds. The results shed light on how cognitive mechanisms shape perceived social networks and highlighted the importance of strong relations, similarity in characteristics, and group structures for their recall. The results show that memory is strongly influenced not only by the relationship between the nominator and the nominated person but also by the relationship between the nominated persons.

**Authors:**

Zoran Kovacevic: ETH Zürich; Christoph Stadtfeld: ETH Zürich

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