Netherlands

The interception of moving targets is a fundamental sensorimotor task involving perception and action. For this task, the dominant approach has been to model the behavioral dynamics using online control laws such as the constant bearing angle strategy, which explain behavior without assuming internal models. Here, we derive a Bayesian model-based optimal control model of an interception task and compare it against the constant bearing angle strategy. First, we show that both models equivalently capture average trajectories, suggesting that observing the interception trajectories in an experiment cannot adjudicate between the two models. However, including realistic levels of perceptual uncertainty, motor variability, and sensorimotor delays leads online control without an internal model to quickly deteriorate in interception performance. We conclude that the empirically observed robustness of the constant bearing angle strategy speaks against a direct coupling of environmental variables and behavior, but instead requires a form of internal model.

**Authors:**

Dominik Straub: Technical University of Darmstadt; Constantin Rothkopf: Technical University of Darmstadt

CogSci 2024

If it looks like online control, it is probably model-based control

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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**<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.

There is a long line of research that has investigated how different kinds of visual information (e.g. optic flow) guide high-speed steering. Additionally, researchers have developed visual control models that capture the relationship between information and steering. Although models have been designed for a variety of steering maneuvers, they all assume that steering behavior remains consistent whether a driver has driven down a road once or numerous times. Thus, models do not address how behavior changes as drivers become familiar with the layout of the road. Our work investigates how drivers incorporate visual information and spatial knowledge to guide steering . We present a virtual driving experiment that examines how steering changes as humans become more familiar with a track, measuring metrics including speed, steering angle, and lane deviation. Results inform the development of a cognitive model that captures the relationship between visual information and spatial knowledge to guide steering behavior.

**Authors:**

Grace Roessling: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Brett Fajen: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The role of spatial knowledge in the on-line control of high-speed steering

During conversations, communication partners rapidly assess shared knowledge based on information in utterances. However, little is known about how this process unfolds, particularly when background information is limited such as when talking to strangers. Do spoken utterances provide valid cues to speaker knowledge? To test this, we applied a cultural consensus framework (e.g., Romney et al., 1986), and asked humans vs. large language models (LLMs) to assess speaker similarity based on their transcribed utterances. On each trial, participants saw two language samples that varied in speaker expertise (e.g., A: expert, B: novice) and were asked which one was more similar to a third sample, which was produced by either an expert or novice (X). Accuracy was highest for GPT-4 followed by humans and GPT-3.5. Humans and GPT-4 were more accurate at categorizing language samples from experts, while GPT-3.5 was better with novices. Likewise, humans and GPT-4 were more accurate with samples from adult compared to child speakers, while GPT-3.5 was similar across the two. Item-level performance by humans and GPT-4 was strongly associated, while both were unrelated to GPT-3.5. Our findings suggest that language-based cultural consensus may enable reliable inferences of common ground during communication, providing an algorithmic-level description of how partners may infer states of the world.

**Authors:**

Sophie Domanski: University of Maryland; Rachel Rudinger: University of Maryland College Park; Marine Carpuat: University of Maryland; Patrick Shafto: Rutgers University - Newark; Yi Ting Huang: University of Maryland College Park

Assessing Common Ground through Language-based Cultural Consensus in Humans and Large Language Models

Humans make sense of space in a variety of ways. We can locate the world relative to our bodies, for instance, and thus adopt an 'egocentric' frame of reference for space. Or we can locate the world relative to self-external frames of reference --- the cardinal directions, perhaps, or salient geographical features such as mountains. Across contexts and cultures, people vary in the frame of reference they adopt to think and communicate about space. Here, we test an explanation of this diversity: Egocentric encoding is encouraged by dense urban environments, particularly when reasoning about small-scale space. We constructed a corpus of three decades of published studies of cross-cultural variation in spatial frames of reference (N > 20,000 participants). Multilevel Bayesian models confirmed that egocentric encoding is more common in cities (vs. rural environments) and for small-scale space. Our conceptualization of space is shaped by the spaces we inhabit.

**Authors:**

Tyler Marghetis: University of California, Merced; Alyssa Viviana Ortega: University of California, Merced; Kevin J. Holmes: Reed College

Ecological relativity of spatial cognition: Humans think about space egocentrically in urban environments

There is debate regarding the role of number words in numerical cognition, especially for understanding exact large numbers. Studies of languages with number words for only small numbers suggest those languages do not provide symbolic scaffolding for exact large numerical cognition. This study investigates numerical cognition in speakers of the Amazonian language Awetý which has twenty number words. In experimental tasks with numbers/objects up to 20, Awetý participants demonstrated high accuracy in counting, verbal number comprehension, verbal and non-verbal one-to-one matching, and exact subtraction. Awetý speakers also performed with high accuracy on approximate non-symbolic number comparison with more than 20 items, i.e. beyond their number word range. Awetý participants performed as well as Portuguese speaking control participants across tasks. These findings demonstrate that knowledge and use of a system of twenty numeral words is sufficient for understanding exact numerical equivalence, at least up to 20, and basic arithmetic proficiency.

**Authors:**

Vera Da Silva Sinha: University of Oxford; Wary Kamaiura Sabino: Secretaria Estadual de Educaçao; Silke M. Göbel: University of York; Asifa Majid: University of Oxford

Understanding exact large number is possible in Amazonian languages

What makes Lassie a smart dog? People have strong intuitions about dogs’ intelligence, yet the content and organization of these intuitions remain unknown. Two studies examined the structure of laypeople’s concepts of dog intelligence, creating a conceptual map of what people represent as a “smart” or “dumb” dog. Study 1 elicited open-ended ideas about dog intelligence. We turned consistent themes into items in a 50-item survey. Study 2 asked participants to picture either a smart or dumb dog and rate that dog on the items derived from Study 1. Participants strongly agreed in their ratings of smart and dumb dogs, and we discovered a coherent dimensional structure underlying people’s intuitions. They represent smart dogs as socially skilled with a good temperament, and dumb dogs as bad at physical reasoning and avoiding threats. These representations align well with findings from canine research and with dog trainers’ practical knowledge.

**Authors:**

Miriam Ross: Brown University ; Daphna Buchsbaum: Brown University; Bertram F. Malle: Brown University

Human Perceptions of Canine Intelligence

The European Upper Palaeolithic is rich in figurative cave art. In particular, prey animals are depicted, often in simple schematic outlines. The role and function of these depic-tions is subject of controversy with many competing ac-counts represented in the literature. Here we apply eye-tracking to investigate participants’ distribution of visual attention as a function of three hypothesized pragmatic functions of the cave art: aesthetic appreciation, narratives about animal behavior, and social learning of animal spe-cies. Results indicate vast variability in visual exploration patterns across the viewing conditions, with more uni-formly distributed attention in the aesthetics condition, more focus on legs and torso in the behavior condition, and more attention to the head regions in the species recognition condition. Findings are discussed in regard to the under- and over-specification of information in the an-imal paintings as a cue to their possible past function.

**Authors:**

Frederieke Nicola Wullf: Aarhus University; Sara Kjær Kristensen: Aarhus University; Isobel Wisher: Aarhus University; Kristian Tylen: Aarhus University

Eyes On the Past: visual exploration of Upper Palaeolithic cave art

Some humans, like other animals, may sense magnetic fields: Gurindji people from Australia can locate a hidden magnet solely based on magnetoreception, but an American control group cannot (Meakins, 2022). Why can only some humans use magnetoreception? One possibility is that human magnetoreception is experience-dependent: the fundamental capability may be universal, but the Gurindji learn to use it reliably because, unlike Americans, their language and culture promotes paying constant attention to cardinal directions and thinking about space using a geocentric cognitive map, which sensing the Earth’s magnetic field would help with. If so, we might expect other cultures using geocentric thinking, such as the Hai//om people from Namibia, to have also learned to use magnetoreception. We tested this and found that, unlike Gurindji, Hai//om people could not locate a hidden magnet at above chance levels, suggesting that learning to think geocentrically may not be sufficient to acquire magnetoreception.

**Authors:**

Yağmur Deniz Kısa: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Roman Stengelin: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Luke Maurits: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Daniel Benjamin Moritz Haun: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Is magnetoreception experience-dependent in humans?

In this paper, we catalog the rates at which people report spiritual presence events: phenomenal experiences understood by the perceiver to imply the presence of a spiritual being. We draw on four large datasets (total N=3150) collected in the US, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, including participants from a range of religious backgrounds. This yields what is, to our knowledge, an unprecedented “epidemiology” of spiritual presence events across diverse cultural settings. While some events vary dramatically in their rates of endorsement across cultural settings, other events are relatively common across all five settings, and still others are relatively rare across settings. In general, the most common events center on ordinary experiences of one’s own inner life, while events that hinge on near-tangible perceptions of presence and hallucination-like events involving outer sensory experiences are relatively rare. In sum, local culture shapes but does not fully determine the architecture of spiritual experience.

**Authors:**

Eleanor Brower Schille-Hudson: Stanford University; Kara Weisman: University of California, Riverside; Tanya Luhrmann: Stanford

Rates of Spiritual Presence Events

People from every culture observe the natural world in detail and organize it into categories, and Western biology builds on this universal impulse towards classification. Here we provide a quantitative analysis of factors that shape folk and scientific classification of birds from areas associated with three indigenous languages (Anindilyakwa, Tlingit, and Zapotec). We find that traditional Linnaean taxonomies align better with folk categories than do modern phylogenetic classifications, which suggests that human perception is responsible in part for the correspondence between Linnaean and folk taxonomies. Perceptual similarity is difficult to measure at scale, but we use the recently-released AVONET database to develop a proxy for the perceptual similarity between pairs of birds and find that traditional Linnaean taxonomies and perceptual similarity both independently predict folk categories. Our results therefore provide quantitative evidence for the view that perceptual similarity influences both scientific and folk classification.

**Authors:**

Zoë Amanda Wilson: University of Melbourne; Charles Kemp: University of Melbourne

Perceptual Similarity and the Relationship Between Folk and Scientific Bird Classification

Understanding visual narratives requires readers to track dimensions of time, spatial location, and characters across a sequence. Previous work found cross-cultural differences for situational changes across adjacent panels, but few works have examined situational dimensions across extended sequences. We therefore investigated situational “runs” – uninterrupted sequences of the situational dimensions (time, space, characters) – in a corpus of 300+ annotated comics from the United States, Europe, and Asia. We compared runs’ proportion and average lengths and found that across books, semantic information changed frequently and run length correlated with proportion. Yet, cross-cultural patterns arose, with American and European comics using more continuous runs than Asian comics. American and European comics used more and longer temporal and character continuity, while Asian comics used more spatial continuity. These findings raise questions about comprehenders’ processing strategies for visual narratives across cultures and how general frameworks of visual narrative comprehension account for variations in situational (dis)continuity.

**Authors:**

Bien Klomberg: Tilburg University; Irmak Hacımusaoğlu: Tilburg University; Neil Cohn: Tilburg University

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