Netherlands

Face-to-face communication is highly complex, with information being transmitted via multiple channels simultaneously. Social gaze can regulate conversation, express emotions, and signal interest or disinterest, and eye contact, or a lack thereof, is a powerful visual cue that influences the dynamics of communication. While previous research has shed light on gaze in autism in general, there remains a lack of 1) evidence on interactions in dialogue between autistic adults (rather than mixed dialogues) and 2) investigations on the influence of gaze on conversational dynamics and interpersonal rapport. We have developed a novel setup with mobile dual eye-tracking glasses that allows for the automatic detection of mutual eye contact. Our exploratory analyses of conversations in homogeneous autistic dyads provide new insights into autistic gaze dynamics and their interrelation with rapport, ultimately helping to advance the current understanding of cognitive diversity and of the fundamental elements of social interaction.

**Authors:**

Malin Spaniol: University Hospital Cologne; Simon Wehrle: University of Cologne; Kai Vogeley: University Hospital Cologne; Martine Grice: University of Cologne

CogSci 2024

Interactions between autistic adults offer a new perspective on social gaze

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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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** 
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**
<div style="position:relative;padding-top:0;width:900px;height:500px;"><iframe style="position:absolute;border:none;width:100%;height:100%;left:0;top:0;" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/cble/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>


**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.

This study examined how vowel length in words affects the gustatory imageries (i.e., sweetness, saltiness, bitterness, sourness, and spiciness). We presented pseudowords containing long and short vowels to native Japanese speakers varying modalities and instructions. The stimuli were presented visually (Study 1, 3, and 4) or auditorily (Study 2). Furthermore, half of participants in Study 3 were instructed to subvocalize the stimuli and the other half not to subvocalize. Words including long vowels were associated with sweetness when presented in katakana characters (Study 1 and 3). Words including short vowels were associated with saltiness when presented in katakana characters (Study 3). Also, words including short vowels were associated with bitterness when presented in hiragana characters (Study 4). Our findings reveal a role of vowel length in taste-sound correspondences in Japanese. It advances the understanding how people obtain information about the expectations of tastes from word forms.

**Authors:**

Toshimune Kambara: Hiroshima University; Mizuki Yoshio: Hiroshima University; Nodoka Okada: Hiroshima University; Rea Kawano: Hiroshima University; Norika Kondo: Hiroshima University; Sho Tamakawa: Hiroshima University

Associations between gustatory imageries and vowel length in Japanese food names

Previous studies have demonstrated that bilinguals have discrete representations for speech sounds that are phonemic in both of their languages. In a lexical identification task for Singapore Mandarin words 椅 (/i2/ ‘chair’) and 鱼 (/y2/ ‘fish’), we find steepness of the identification functions differs among bilinguals with different linguistic experience, with steeper slopes for early English-Mandarin bilinguals (for whom the /y/ vowel is phonemic) and shallower slopes for early English-Malay bilinguals (for whom /y/ is not phonemic, but is largely discriminable in the forced choice task). With nuanced language background information, this finding suggests that exposure to both /i/ and /y/ in early development shapes phonemic perception. Model comparisons demonstrate that continuous measures of early exposure are more powerful than simple categorical groupings of bilingual ‘type’. Continuous measures of bilingual exposure are therefore highlighted as useful tools in the investigation of phoneme perception.

**Authors:**

Lei Pan: National Institute of Education; Suzy J. Styles: Nanyang Technological University

Missing /y/: Vowel perception in bilinguals whose languages differ in whether the high front rounded vowel is phonemic

Speakers and listeners show an informativity bias in the use and interpretation of color modifiers. For example, speakers use color more often when referring to objects that vary in color than to objects with a prototypical color. Likewise, listeners look away from objects with prototypical colors upon hearing that color mentioned. Here we test whether speakers and listeners account for another factor related to informativity: the strength of the association between lexical categories and color. Our results demonstrate that speakers and listeners’ choices are indeed influenced by this factor; as such, it should be integrated into current pragmatic theories of informativity and computational models of color reference.

**Authors:**

Madeleine Long: University of Edinburgh; Paula Rubio-Fernández: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Beyond typicality: Lexical category affects the use and processing of color words

Because information theory equates information with event occurrence probabilities, when applying its methods, language researchers typically take the information provided by words to be their relative frequencies in a corpus. This implicitly assumes words occur uniformly across contexts, however empirically, word distributions are bursty: the likelihood of most words appearing in most contexts is small, whereas the likelihood of a word recurring in context is much higher. In an elicitation study we examined whether speakers are sensitive to the dynamic word occurrence probabilities this implies. Consistent with proposals that prenominal adjectives increase noun predictability, participants produced numerous seemingly redundant adjectives prior to unambiguous nouns at first mention. However, despite receiving no feedback, they produced significantly fewer adjectives before subsequent mentions of the same nouns, indicating they had re-evaluated their probabilities. These results support the idea that prenominal adjectives facilitate efficient communication, and that speakers' representations of lexical probabilities are dynamic.

**Authors:**

Santina Simone Kemper: Humboldt Universität zu Berlin ; Holly Elizabeth Jenkins: University of Oxford; Elizabeth Wonnacott: University of Oxford; Michael Ramscar: University of Tübingen

Rethinking Probabilities: Why Corpus Frequencies Cannot Capture Speakers' Dynamic Linguistic Behavior

Our world knowledge is deeply embedded in language. The word “banana” immediately brings to our mind the color “yellow”. Oftentimes, however, when we read about “banana”, we do not expect the color “yellow” to be explicitly mentioned as in “yellow banana”. Omission of the obvious information in our world knowledge is predicted by the so-called informativity expectations, which captures our preferences for newsworthy and informative utterances. Here we present two studies investigating informativity expectations in a socially situated context and testing whether expressions like “female nurses” are less preferred than expressions like “female directors”. While the results showed a clear impact of the informativity expectations, effects of gender stereotypes turned out to be difficult to overcome.

**Authors:**

Hailin Hao: University of Southern California; Muxuan He: University of Southern California; Zuzanna Fuchs: University of Southern California

Greta is a female director: When gender stereotypes interact with informativity expectations

We investigated the emergence of dispersion in phonological systems using an established experimental paradigm in which pairs of participants play a non-linguistic communication game, taking turns to select discrete colors from a continuous underlying space and send them to each other to communicate animal silhouettes. Over time participants established sets of signals made up of combinatorial color units, analogous to the phonemes of natural language. This allowed us to investigate the role of interactive pressures on the emergence of organizational structure in phonological inventories, principally dispersion. We manipulated minimum signal length (as a means of investigating the role of coarticulation) and the presence of probabilistic noise. We also manipulated the nature of the underlying color space. There was an effect of colorspace but not of noise or minimum signal-length. However, dispersion occurred at above-chance levels in all conditions. Our results provide evidence for the role of communicative interaction in the emergence and cultural evolution of phonological structure.

**Authors:**

Gareth Roberts: University of Pennsylvania; Jianjing Kuang: University of Pennsylvania; Robin Clark: University of Pennsylvania

Communicative factors in the emergence of phonological dispersion

When someone says 'My soup was warm', they are often understood as saying that it was warm, but not hot. This is assumed to arise via a scalar implicature. According to the standard assumption, 'warm' and 'hot' are in competition and by saying 'warm', we reason that the speaker did not intend to convey 'hot'. This exclusion of alternatives should apply uniformly to any expression that can be ordered on a scale. Yet there are substantial differences in the endorsement rates of the strengthened meaning between various scales. These could be due to the availability of expressions or to the underlying semantic structure. We use priming to measure how active in the mind lexical expressions are. Contrary to the standard assumption, the more an expression was primed, the less likely a scalar implicature was endorsed. We discuss how the semantic structure of adjectives can support pragmatic reasoning without lexical alternatives.

**Authors:**

Radim Lacina: Osnabrück University; Nicole Gotzner: Cognitive Science Institute

Exploring scalar diversity through priming: A lexical decision study with adjectives

Several studies show that lexical frequency influences linguistic processing and, when uncontrolled, can confound the results of psycholinguistic experiments. Given the scarcity of solid frequency data for sign languages, this study aims to know the subjective frequency of 277 signs of the Uruguayan Sign Language (LSU). The study is available online (its source code is publicly available) and allows the collection of frequency estimates. This tool was validated by running the experiment with Rioplatense Spanish words and comparing the estimates with measures of objective frequency based on corpora and reaction times observed in lexical decision tasks. The results will allow us to know the variation of frequency according to typical variables in psycholinguistic studies, such as region, age, and ethnicity, and according to variables more typical of sign language studies, such as the age of language acquisition, use of the language at home, and the educational background of the participants.

**Authors:**

Martín Dutra: University of the Republic; Roberto Aguirre: Universidad de la República

Subjective Frequency Ratings for 277 LSU Signs

Collocations, semi-productive lexical combinations with one figurative and one literal word, are said to be a ``pain in the neck'' for researchers and L2 learners. The present study aims: (i) to conceptually replicate the processing costs incurred by L1 speakers when processing collocations using a larger and more diverse set of items, (ii) to use literalness judgements to test whether L1 speakers are aware of the semi-transparent meaning of a collocation, and (iii) to test whether the presence of processing costs associated with collocations can be predicted from literalness judgements. If so, we propose that literalness judgements could be used as a diagnostic for reliably identifying collocations. We replicate the L1 processing costs with a larger stimulus set and demonstrate that speakers are aware of the semi-transparent meaning of the collocation. We further show that L1 speaker judgements about the literalness of a word combination can be used to predict its status as a collocation

**Authors:**

Sydelle de Souza: University of Edinburgh; Francis Mollica: University of Melbourne; Jennifer Culbertson: University of Edinburgh

What can L1 speakers tell us about killing hope? A Novel Behavioral Measure for Identifying Collocations

Mandarin Chinese has a logographic writing system consisting of characters (e.g., 朋 and 友) that are monosyllabic morphemes often combined to form words (i.e., 朋友, “friend”). The vast majority of Chinese words consists of two monosyllabic characters. This research describes the construction and properties of the Chinese character network and demonstrates how its network structure has implications for the lexical processing of Chinese characters through an analysis of Chinese megastudy data. Capitalizing on a database of over 25,000 double-character Chinese words, a network representation was created to represent how single characters are combined to form double-character Chinese words. Network measures such as degree and closeness centrality were retrieved from the network representation and included as predictors in a regression model to predict visual lexical decision performance of single Chinese characters. Network measures contributed additional variance beyond traditional variables such as number of strokes and character frequency.

**Authors:**

Cynthia S.Q. Siew: National University of Singapore

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