Netherlands

Function – what a thing is for – and mechanism – how a thing’s parts interact to make it work – are considered by cognitive psychologists and philosophers of science to be integrally related despite people’s acute sensitivity to their differences. Here, we set out to better characterize lay adults’ intuitions about functional and mechanistic knowledge (Study 1). Then, we use learning studies to investigate to what degree these intuitions accurately capture functional and mechanistic cognition (Studies 2, 3). While some intuitions (e.g., that mechanism is more difficult to learn than function) are supported by these learning studies, others (e.g., that function should precede mechanism in explanations) are not. Possible reasons for matches and mismatches are explored.

**Authors:**

Amanda McCarthy: Yale University; Emma Courtney: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Frank Keil: Yale University

CogSci 2024

Strong but wrong: Adult’s intuitions of functional and mechanistic knowledge

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.

poster

Modern intelligent tutoring systems, exploiting latest technological advances in augmented and virtual reality (XR) and Large Language Models, offer fluent natural language interaction between a virtual character and a student complemented with a multimodal interface, including recognition and synthesis of affects and intentions expressed in speech tonality (content and voice), facial expression, gaze, gestures, and body language. Being concerned with consumer satisfaction, developers of such systems often miss the educational needs. Here we present a Virtual Tutor that, using the above technologies, helps students to self-regulate during learning. This is made possible based on the self-regulated learning theory integrated into an emotional cognitive architecture. Virtual Tutor uses its emotional intelligence to model, guide, and motivate students to engage in self-regulation. It does it in parallel with performing the basic tutoring functions. Results of our preliminary study provide some evidence of support, showing higher scores for its normal vs. control mode.

**Authors:**

Alexei V Samsonovich: National Research Nuclear University "MEPhI"; Anastasia Kitsantas: George Mason University

Supporting student self-regulation in virtual tutoring through emotionally intelligent cognitive architecture

Feedback, when used successfully, supports student learning and motivation. Although various types of feedback are used in actual classroom teaching and learning, however, most interactive learning systems provide feedback that addresses learner performance only (e.g., correctness feedback). We developed two versions of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for learning ratio calculations using mathematics number lines that differed in the type of feedback it provides: effort-based and performance-based feedback. We conducted a school-based experiment with 5th graders in Japan to test the effectiveness of the two types of feedback on student learning and motivation. The results imply that performance-based feedback in the ITS had a positive impact on student learning. Still, no difference was found on learner motivation. This study adds new knowledge of what types of adaptive feedback are effective for student learning in mathematics.

**Authors:**

Shintaro Sato: Saarland University; Melanie Platz: Saarland University; Tomohiro Nagashima: Saarland University

Which Leads to More Effective Learning in Intelligent Tutoring Software: Effort-based or Performance-based Feedback?

The human voice conveys more than just words; acoustic-vocal cues like pitch range and formant dispersion can shape perceptions of a speaker's personality. While research has explored this in various contexts, the impact of vocal cues on perceptions of teachers' traits remains unclear, particularly considering the educational level of listeners. This study investigates how college and secondary students perceive teacher utterances with manipulated acoustic parameters. Results showed that students from both age groups considered voices with a wider pitch range as being uttered by good teachers, but only the secondary students perceived a higher F0 and a wider formant dispersion as a feature of being a good teacher. Those suggest the mappings between teachers' characteristics and acoustic features might be different by age or education level, which could potentially the future teacher training for different levels of education.

**Authors:**

Mingyu Weng: Purdue University; Wenxi Fei: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Michael C. W. Yip: The Education University of Hong Kong

Influence of Vocal Cues on Perception of Traits: Evidence from Educational Context

Research on second-language (L2) English literacy development in Chinese children with dyslexia is limited, but existing studies suggest a puzzling phenomenon: These children experience difficulties in reading both native (L1) Chinese and L2 English, despite the distinct cognitive processes involved in reading Chinese and English which suggest minimal transfer between the two writing systems. This paper aims to investigate the above phenomenon and examine the role of phonics skills in improving English word reading in dyslexic Chinese children in 2 studies. Study 1 found that phonics knowledge robustly and significantly predicted English word naming and reading fluency in Chinese dyslexic children. Study 2 revealed that phonics-based interventions is required to significantly improve English literacy skills. The accommodation-assimilation hypothesis explains cross-language transfer of reading difficulties in Chinese-English bilinguals: Dyslexic Chinese children assimilate English word-decoding processes using their native language; they can accommodate and improve English literacy by learning phonics skills.

**Authors:**

Ricky Van-yip Tso: The University of Hong Kong; Tsz-chung Ronald Chan: The University of Hong Kong; Kit-yu Kitty Yeung: The University of Hong Kong; Robert Savage: York University; Wai Ting Siok: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Kathy Shum: University of Hong Kong

Decoding the Bilingual Puzzle in Chinese Children with Dyslexia: Should L2 English Literacy be Salvaged Through Assimilation or Accommodation?

Having better knowledge of fractions is causally related to the ability to learn algebra, so what happens when teaching and learning about fractions is disrupted, as was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic? In this study, we examine how educational disruption caused by a pandemic differentially impacted students’ fraction learning relative to students who were learning other mathematics content during that time. This study provides results from a cross-sequential project examining various facets of mathematics knowledge for students in 4th-10th grades over three years (2021, 2022, 2023; N=903 students). We investigate differences in fractions and algebra knowledge based on students’ grade levels across cohorts to determine if there are particular periods at which students’ learning was differentially affected by the disruption. Individual differences in students’ self-regulation, self-efficacy, and personality will also be explored as potential buffers.

**Authors:**

Julie L. Booth: Temple University; Renée M Tobin: Temple University; Christina Barbieri: University of Delaware

COVID-19 Disruptions in Learning of Critical Mathematics Content

All numbers can be positioned on a number line. Children's understanding of this fact, as well as their ability to actually place said numbers, have been shown to both foster and predict their success with more complex mathematics. Although several studies reported difficulties in placing rational numbers such as fractions, none did provide a thorough assessment of children’s errors. In this work, we tested around 26,000 pupils from 6th- to 10th-grades and analyzed what specific errors they made. Several systematic error patterns emerged and were shared across all grades and curricula, albeit in different frequencies. We propose that children’s responses are driven by a dual-strategy model that chains a number of subprocedures in an input-output sequence. Some of them may sometimes include 'bugs' or can even be ad hoc procedures made to match the input with the expected output, both of which can explain the observed incorrect responses.

**Authors:**

Maxime Cauté: CEA, Inserm, Université Paris-Saclay; Cassandra Potier-Watkins: CEA, Inserm, Université Paris-Saclay; Chenxi He: CEA, Inserm, Université Paris-Saclay; Stanislas Dehaene: CEA, Inserm, Université Paris-Saclay

Evaluating the comprehension of fractions in 6th to 10th grade using a graduated number line test

Young children are frequently exposed to mixed messages about the value of their effort: Educators talk about the importance of effort, but give rewards (e.g., grades) based on children’s achievement. How do these mixed messages about effort influence children’s motivation? Here, we presented 4- to 5-year-old children (N = 80) with an initial verbal message preaching about the importance of effort and generated mixed messages by rewarding participants either by their effort (consistent) or performance (inconsistent) across a series of visual search tasks. We found that children persisted longer on the immediate task, as well as on a novel, transfer task, when they received consistent versus inconsistent messages about effort. These findings suggest that consistent messages about the value of effort across modalities foster children’s persistence.

**Authors:**

Elaine Wang: Yale University; Mia Radovanovic: University of Toronto; Jessica Sommerville: University of Toronto; Julia Anne Leonard: Yale University

Practice what you preach: Consistent messages about the value of effort foster children's persistence

Humans are born with an intuitive representation of the physics world. How accurate is intuitive physics? Researchers from education focus on the failures, students' errors and misconceptions while cognitive psychologists argue humans anticipate and manipulate physical environments in ways betraying veridical knowledge of classical mechanics. One solution is to hypothesize there are distinct systems of “cognitive physics” with different limitations and deployment in the tasks favored by the two literatures. The goal of current study is to gather evidence from psychometric studies by estimating how many distinct factors explain performance on intuitive physics assessments. We build an augmented concept inventory including several previously-validated concept inventories, around 120 items. The pilot study indicated that participants recruited online from Prolific displayed expected accuracy on the tasks. We are now collecting around 1,000 participants and applying multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) analyzes to identify the latent structure.

**Authors:**

Wei Li: Boston College; Joshua K Hartshorne: Boston College

Latent Structure of Intuitive Physics

This study investigates metacognitive awareness among students, focusing particularly on 'subjective confidence' as a predictor of potential conceptual change. In our study, 132 eighth graders completed a basic number knowledge test and evaluated their confidence level for each answer. Our analysis revealed that metacognitive accuracy—the alignment of confidence levels with actual performance—was significantly related to academic achievement scores in the 'Two-Numbers Comparison' task (e.g., choosing the correct inequality such as '1/2 > 1/3' or '1/2 < 1/3'), but not in the 'Number Approximations' task (e.g., choosing the closest result to '21/10 + 60/31' from options such as 2, 4, 41, or 81). Additionally, we observed distinct behavioral patterns in response times: the 'Two-Numbers Comparison' task elicited rapid responses, whereas the 'Number Approximations' task resulted in slower, more reflective responses. In conclusion, our results indicate that metacognitive processes are more actively engaged during intuitive thinking compared to reflective thinking.

**Authors:**

Tomohito Yamazaki: Graduate School of Media and Governance; Mutsumi Imai: Faculty of Environment and Information Studies

Differential Metacognitive Activation in Intuitive versus Reflective Thinking in Classroom Assessment Test

Math affect (i.e., attitudes/beliefs about math) and feedback are predictors of mathematical performance. How these factors jointly influence cognition during mathematical problem-solving is less understood. A computer mouse-tracking task was used to assess math affect and computation ability of 78 undergraduate volunteers, before and after feedback (none; positive; negative). Positive affect toward math significantly predicted better accuracy on mathematical computations, but performance improved noticeably after positive feedback. This led to the question of whether or not feedback and affective components of math impact decision-making. Post-baseline, participants' ability to calculate the mathematical problems sped up significantly — evidence of a practice effect. Individuals with more negative attitudes toward math exhibited more indecision in their responses when they received feedback, whereas participants with more positive attitudes toward computation reduced their indecision after feedback. This suggests that feedback interacts with math affect in important ways, impacting in-the-moment cognitive processing during mathematical calculation.

**Authors:**

Shruti Kate: Kent State University; Peri Goldblatt: Kent State University; Katie Asaro: Kent State University; Giulia Borriello: Kent State University; Jennifer Roche: Kent State University

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Supporting student self-regulation in virtual tutoring through emotionally intelligent cognitive architecture

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