Netherlands

Although well-intentioned, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives aim to increase minority representation in elite groups, they can sometimes backfire by lowering successful candidates’ beliefs about their competence. Prior work in social psychology suggests that this effect is driven by stereotype threat. Here, we propose a novel cognitive framework: DEI initiatives backfire due to causal inference. When candidates hear that they were selected based on a DEI initiative and/or enter a group where they are a minority, they may hypothesize that their selection was based more on their identity and less on their merit. Across two pre-registered experiments manipulating selection messages (DEI vs. merit) and statistical gender representation (represented or underrepresented in the selected group), we find evidence in favor of our hypothesis. Effects replicated across different selection task difficulties and did not differ by gender. However, selection messages and under-representation did not impact people&#39;s assessment of their ability at the selected task. Taken together, our work shows that people form different causal hypotheses about the role of their merit and identity in their admission to an elite group based on DEI selection messages and group composition. Importantly, this work paves the way for designing DEI-based initiatives that license more helpful causal inferences about success to ensure that minority candidates thrive in their positions.

**Authors:**

Aarthi Popat: Yale University; Julia Anne Leonard: Yale University

CogSci 2024

“I’m here for my gender, not my skill”: Causal reasoning shapes beliefs about merit in response to DEI initiatives

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.

Although well-intentioned, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives aim to increase minority representation in elite groups, they can sometimes backfire by lowering successful candidates’ beliefs about their competence. Prior work in social psychology suggests that this effect is driven by stereotype threat. Here, we propose a novel cognitive framework: DEI initiatives backfire due to causal inference. When candidates hear that they were selected based on a DEI initiative and/or enter a group where they are a minority, they may hypothesize that their selection was based more on their identity and less on their merit. Across two pre-registered experiments manipulating selection messages (DEI vs. merit) and statistical gender representation (represented or underrepresented in the selected group), we find evidence in favor of our hypothesis. Effects replicated across different selection task difficulties and did not differ by gender. However, selection messages and under-representation did not impact people's assessment of their ability at the selected task. Taken together, our work shows that people form different causal hypotheses about the role of their merit and identity in their admission to an elite group based on DEI selection messages and group composition. Importantly, this work paves the way for designing DEI-based initiatives that license more helpful causal inferences about success to ensure that minority candidates thrive in their positions.

**Authors:**

Aarthi Popat: Yale University; Julia Anne Leonard: Yale University

poster

Suppose you are asked to choose randomly between left or right 100 times, would you expect the average of your choices to be roughly even or to have a bias? In the literature, human randomness falls on a spectrum from being close to unbiased to very biased in random choices. To create a model with a neural implementation of human randomness, unsupervised artificial neural networks were used to generate a random representation of binary numbers. These random representations were tested with both orthogonal and correlated stimuli as inputs and the properties of all outputs are discussed. An example of how to bias this generated randomness to model different cognitive processes is shown under two conditions, where random decisions are biased for desired outcomes and for list exhaustion (random sampling without replacement). Other possible uses for this method of generating randomness in cognitive modelling are discussed.

**Authors:**

Kinsey A Church: University of Ottawa; Marija Bolic: University of Ottawa; Sylvain Chartier: University of Ottawa

Generating Distributed Randomness using Artificial Neural Networks

While a number of disciplines have empirically investigated self-control (e.g., psychology, cognitive science, and sociology, along with philosophy), they have offered differing (although overlapping) perspectives. A process-based, mechanistic theory explaining empirical self-control data can help integrate these perspectives. A mechanistic (computational) approach through a computational cognitive architecture where simulations can be performed may unify the interpretations of empirical studies based on various (e.g., implicit-explicit) conflicts as well as utility calculation (e.g., from motivational considerations). Such a framework may capture notions of self-control capacity and self-control decrease (or failure), facilitating detailed explanations.

**Authors:**

Adan Alberto Gomez: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Ron Sun: RPI

A “Rational” Framework for Self-Control

How can we explain that people are capable of performing new tasks with no or little instruction? Earlier work has proposed that new tasks can be acquired by a rapid composition of cognitive skills, and implemented this in the ACT-R and PRIMs cognitive architectures. Here we discuss a possible application of rapid composition in building tutoring systems. The goal is to identify underlying skills through unsupervised machine learning from a dataset of arithmetic learning for students in a Dutch vocational program. The resulting skill graph is used as a basis for a tutoring system. The results show evidence for predictive power of the system, and tentative evidence of a learning benefit compared to control groups.

**Authors:**

Niels Taatgen: University of Groningen; Corné Hoekstra: University of Groningen; Jori Blankestijn: MemoryLab

Data-driven cognitive skills with an application in personalized education

It takes children considerable learning and development to accurately predict whether an object is safely balanced or will fall --- something that happens if its center of mass is not supported from below. In the meantime, children go through a characteristic set of mistaken beliefs. Here we use an adapted version of the classical balance task to evaluate whether different models go through the same stages. Preliminary results show that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) do learn the task but do not necessarily go through the same stages. We are also testing several simulation-based accounts. We anticipate completing this work in time for the conference. The findings will help clarify the space of possible accounts of children’s acquisition of intuitions about gravity and balance.

**Authors:**

Tianyi Li: Boston College; Mengguo Jing: The Ohio State University; Zakir Makhani: Northeastern University; Iris Oved: Boston College; Nikhil Krishnaswamy: Colorado State University; James Pustejovsky: Brandeis University; Joshua K Hartshorne: Boston College

Modeling the development of intuitive mechanics

One of the core properties of human language is compositionality: the meaning of a sentence can be understood by the meaning of individual words and the rules for combining them (Szabó, 2020). We investigate the development of conceptual compositionality (the combination of concepts). In our study, 6- to 9-year-old children (N = 40) were shown a card with two objects (e.g., a car and a star). Participants were introduced to two characters (a robot and a wizard) that used their powers to change the objects in different ways (e.g., turning one object pink). In the test trials, participants were asked to predict what a card would look like after both characters used their powers on the same card. All participants successfully learned the character's powers, but only participants 7.5 years and older succeeded in the compositionality test trials. Our findings suggest that by age 7.5 children can successfully compose functions.

**Authors:**

Stephanie Alderete: University of California, Berkeley; Wenqing Cao: University of California, Berkeley; Steven Piantadosi: UC Berkeley; Fei Xu: UC Berkeley

The Development of Conceptual Compositionality in Children

This study investigated the effect of encoding context on the formation of false memories, using Category Associates Procedure with pictorial stimuli. In the literature, distinctiveness is suggested to decrease false memories; however, the mechanisms of this effect are still of debate. Participants studied objects from several categories, each category list either presented on congruent or incongruent backgrounds. Later, they performed a recognition test for three item types: studied, critical lure and unrelated items. We expected that incongruent condition should require more distinctive encoding, which may lead to decreased false recognition of critical lures compared to congruent condition. The results revealed a false memory effect consistent with existing literature; however, there was no difference between congruent and incongruent conditions in terms of false memory rates. The results were discussed in the light of encoding-based and retrieval-based theories. Additionally, visual imagery measures and reported strategies were also considered.

**Authors:**

İrem Küsmüş: Sabancı University; Olesya Blazhenkova: Sabanci University

The effect of encoding context on false memory formation in a picture-based category associates procedure

What is the developmental trajectory of probability learning in early childhood, and how do changes in choice behavior relate to changes in executive functions? We conducted a two-year longitudinal study with children during the ages from 3.5 to 6.5 years (N = 74 at T1) and complemented behavioral analyses with computational modeling to illuminate underlying cognitive processes. On average, children became more likely to choose the high-probability option as they grew older and increasingly diversified choices in line with probability matching by T3. Moreover, younger children in the cohort were more likely to maximize probability than older children. Our analyses suggest that increasing choice diversification across childhood may relate to improving executive functions and value-based learning, whereas probability maximizing may serve as an easily implementable satisficing strategy. Finally, our findings emphasize how children’s variability in choice behavior may affect the estimated direction of change and highlight the need for longitudinal research.

**Authors:**

Anna Isabel Thoma: Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development; Christin Schulze: UNSW

Probability Learning and Repeated Choice in Childhood: A Longitudinal Study

As adults, we readily work through alternative possibilities and their potential consequences in our minds before acting. This capacity for mental simulation enables us to internally explore alternatives without incurring costs of acting in reality. Young children are highly exploratory in the real world, but little is known about their ability to engage in internal exploration via mental simulation. This preregistered study (1) examines developmental changes in the use of mental simulation when solving problems with multiple options, and (2) investigates the influence of resource availability on the tendency to simulate. Adults (N=30) and 4-to 7-year-olds (target N=120; data collection ongoing) completed computer-based puzzles where they chose where to drop balls into a vertical maze to hit a goal. Accuracy and latency to act were measured as indices of mental simulation. Our findings will contribute to understanding children’s problem-solving, and could lead to a new conceptualization of their exploratory behaviour.

**Authors:**

Emma C Tecwyn: York St John University; Angela Nyhout: University of Kent

The development of mental simulation as a strategy for solving problems with multiple alternatives

Brain breaks are often used during lessons to replenish childrens’ attention, but children may respond differently to the variety of brain breaks they are offered. Therefore, two studies were conducted to identify both teachers’ current use of brain breaks (Study 1) as well as the types of brain breaks children prefer (Study 2). Study 1 consisted of a survey of K-2 teachers (N = 796) across the United States regarding the implementation and types of brain breaks commonly used in their classrooms. The three most common break types reported by teachers were physical activity breaks, videos, and dancing. Study 2 consisted of a forced choice task in which elementary and middle-school students were asked to pick between two instantiations of six different break types: cognitive engagement breaks, mindfulness exercises, physical activity breaks, nature videos, coloring, and mind wandering. For each break type, children were asked to pick the instantiation they preferred as well as the one they believed would help them focus. Children were then asked to rank the six breaks they selected from most to least preferred and most to least beneficial for focusing. Ongoing data collection (N = 22) revealed that children were more likely to rank cognitive engagement breaks as their most preferred break. Analyses within break type revealed that students preferred mazes over pattern blocks as a cognitive engagement break, videos of forest scenery over cows grazing for a nature video break, and color jump over calisthenics as their physical activity break.

**Authors:**

Praveen Kumaravelan: University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Audrey Leroux: Georgia State University; Karrie E. Godwin: University of Maryland Baltimore County

Brain Breaks: Teacher Usage And Child Preference

This study examines 205 4- to 12-year-old children’s beliefs about the abilities of three technological informants (the internet as a whole, Google search, and Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker) to answer questions about celebrity and non-celebrity people and near future and far future events. The results indicate that, with increasing age, children increasingly indicate that these sources can accurately answer questions about near future events and celebrities but not about non-celebrities or far future events. Although children increasingly indicate that these sources cannot tell them about everyday people, the oldest children in the sample believe that the internet is more likely to be able to tell you about non-celebrities than Alex or a Google search. Children’s understanding of the capacities of technology change with age and information type, perhaps reflecting changes in children’s experiences online. Implications for children’s learning and understanding of privacy are discussed.

**Authors:**

Lauren Girouard-Hallam: University of Michigan; Judith Danovitch: University of Louisville

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