Netherlands

Human communication benefits from concurrent multimodal information, e.g., seeing and hearing speakers talk. Familiarization with the face of a talking speaker later helps voice
recognition in auditory-only conditions, e.g., on the phone.
Based on human neuroscience findings, we hypothesized that this so-called ’face-benefit’ develops from two factors. (1.) Generative models in the brain integrate information from different modalities into multimodal contexts to better predict the trajectory of the speech signal. (2.) Once a context, e.g., a speaker, is sufficiently learned, the model substitutes absent sensory inputs, e.g., their face, with predictions via simulation.
We trained a deep generative model for multimodal predictions on synthetic data of audio-visual talking faces. Subsequently, we tested the model’s ability to recognize familiar and unfamiliar speakers from auditory-only data. We plan to compare different processing pathways to analyze which model structure best explains human behavioral data of previous experiments on voice identity recognition.

**Authors:**

Christian Gumbsch: TUD Dresden University of Technology; Martin V. Butz: University of Tuebingen; Katharina von Kriegstein: TU Dresden University of Technology

CogSci 2024

Modeling auditory voice recognition improvements by face simulation

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

poster

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 McGurk effect is a demonstration of the multimodal nature of speech perception; listening to /b/ while watching visual mouth movements for /g/ is expected to result in a “fusion” perception of /d/. A majority of studies on the effect use isolated syllables, whereas our goal was to enhance ecological validity by examining word stimuli. We varied task (forced-choice vs. open-ended) and stimuli (words vs. non-words) between participants. In the word condition, all three stimuli formed words (e.g., beer/deer/gear), and in the non-word condition, the B, D, or G stimulus was a word while the other two were nonwords (e.g., besk/desk/gesk). Fusion responses were much lower than in previous studies, but importantly, participants showed the most fusion responses when the D stimulus was a word and B and G were non-words. These results challenge assumptions about the underlying mechanisms of the McGurk effect, arguing against a purely perceptual illusion.

**Authors:**

Laura Getz: University of San Diego

Did you say Beer, Deer, or Gear? Exploring the McGurk effect using word stimuli

We tailor the explanations we give depending on the person asking for them – you would explain why an event happened differently depending on which of the contributing causes the listener already knows. While significant prior work focuses on how causal structure in the world influences explanation, we focus on how explanation production is modulated by listener belief. We propose a computational model framing explanation as rational communication about causal events, using a recursive theory-of-mind and language production framework to choose amongst possible explanatory utterances that minimize the divergence between speaker and listener belief about a why an event happened. We evaluate our model using some partial observer stimuli, which manipulate the listener’s stated prior knowledge about an event, and find that our model well-predicts human judgements about which of several contributing causes is the best explanation for a speaker to provide by modeling their communicative value to the listener.

**Authors:**

Yuka Machino: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ron Shprints: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Max Siegel: MIT; Lionel Wong: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Josh Tenenbaum: MIT

Listener Knowledge Structures Commonsense Explanation

The Event Segmentation Theory suggests that people naturally divide everyday experiences into distinct units, with event boundaries serving as anchors in long-term memory and aiding recall. These boundaries are ubiquitous in children’s daily experiences and may significantly influence learning. This study investigated how event boundaries affect novel category learning in young children. Specifically, 23 English-speaking three-year-olds learned novel object categories under two conditions. In the event boundary condition, objects were moved across two different background contexts, whereas in the control condition, they remained within the same backgrounds. We hypothesized that presenting objects across an event boundary would enhance generalization. Unexpectedly, both conditions yielded similar performance. An order effect emerged, with initially introduced categories showing better performance, suggesting the impact of task structure and children’s differing interpretations of event boundaries, particularly among females. This finding opens avenues for further investigation into the role of event boundaries in early category learning.

**Authors:**

Alice Xu: University of California, Los Angeles; James Stigler: University of California, Los Angeles; Catherine Sandhofer: University of California, Los Angeles

The Effect of Event Boundaries on 3-Year-Olds’ Novel Category Learning

Studies of children's number knowledge have revealed their awareness of a variety of cognitive strategies supporting counting, even for sets that they do not or cannot count. For instance, even if a set is too large to count, they judge that adding, then removing an object yields the same cardinality. Very young children understand that the counting routine involves establishing one-to-one correspondence, even when they themselves cannot count. Such studies have focused on what children know about number. We focus instead on what children understand about properties of sets that make them more or less easy to count. We varied the size, numerosity, density, and layout of set elements across 12 trials, such that one set in each pair was easier to track and remember. Preschoolers succeeded on some but not all trials, showing early sensitivity and learning opportunities regarding how set features influence counting difficulty.

**Authors:**

Karla E Perez: MIT; Max Siegel: MIT; Nicole Coates: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Josh Tenenbaum: MIT; Laura Schulz: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Knowing What Counts for Counting

Infants develop the ability to anticipate action goals during their first year, as shown by anticipatory gaze behavior. As they grow older, this is first evident for most familiar actions and agents, e.g., human hands performing a reaching action; later also for unusual agents (e.g., mechanical claws). We argue that this ability emerges as infants attempt to segment the world they observe into events---to infer the currently unfolding events and to predict their consequences for minimizing anticipated uncertainty. We propose a computational model that explains this development from a functional, algorithmic perspective, CAPRI2 (Cognitive Action PRediction And Inference in Infants). Our model integrates proposals about the development of object files, event files, and physical reasoning abilities into a learning and probabilistic planning-as-inference framework. While observing goal-directed, or arbitrary, interactions between two objects (i.e., potential agent and patient), CAPRI2's active inference processes infer both maximally consistent event interpretations and motor actions (here, eye fixations), where the latter are executed in the service of further minimizing current and anticipated uncertainties. As a result, CAPRI2 models typical developmental patterns of infants' anticipatory gaze behavior in an emergent manner. In particular, to successfully model the emergent developmental pattern, our model suggests that infants activate object event files, implicitly reason about object interactions in an event-oriented manner, infer consistent interpretations of their observations, and control their gaze shifts to minimize anticipated uncertainty. We propose that these mechanisms, as reflected in our model, may constitute fundamental building blocks for developing goal-predictive capacities in infants.

**Authors:**

Johanna Katharina Theuer: University of Tübingen; Nadine Nicole Koch: University of Stuttgart; Christian Gumbsch: TUD Dresden University of Technology; Birgit Elsner: University of Potsdam; Martin V. Butz: University of Tuebingen

Modeling the Emergent Development of Inference-based Goal Anticipation in Infants

Filled pauses (e.g., um) help speakers to maintain a conversational floor with their listener(s). Considered an advanced form of disfluency; they emerge when children obtain some language competency. Bilinguals might frequently produce filled pauses as they are sensitive to communication. This longitudinal study examined Turkish-English bilingual (N=50) and Turkish monolingual (N=48) children’s production of filled pauses in L1-Turkish and L2-English narratives. Children in three age groups were recruited in Time1 (5-,7- and 9-year-olds) and Time2 (6-,8- and 10-year-olds) and were asked to narrate a story from a picture book. Results showed that controlling for L1-Turkish proficiency scores, the filled pause frequency in L1-Turkish narratives increased from Time1 to Time2, both for bilinguals and monolinguals for all age groups. We obtained the same findings for bilingual children’s English narratives, controlling for English proficiency. We suggest that filled pauses might stem from metacognitive processes, which become more prominent with age.

**Authors:**

Burcu Arslan: Koc University; Tilbe Göksun: Koç University; Aslı Aktan Erciyes: Kadir Has University

A longitudinal study on the production of filled pauses among bilingual and monolingual children

Recent work using neural networks and crowd-sourced perceptual judgements has shown that human figure drawings contain latent structure that can predict many characteristics of the artist including parent-reported motor function and perceived gender. We extend these approaches to two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional cubes, assessing whether latent structure in these cube drawings likewise predicts demographic characteristics and motor function measured via a paper-folding task. Drawings produced with marker and paper showed a large predictive relationship with paper-folding (accounting for 59% of the offset variance, 62% of the angle variance, ps < .01). We also observed a complex interaction with gender: better cube-drawings predicted better paper-folding for male-identifying participants, but this relationship was reversed for female-identifying participants, who also showed better paper folding overall. The results suggest that cube drawings contain richer structure than previously recognized and can provide a useful nonverbal metric for characterizing aspects of cognitive and motor abilities.

**Authors:**

Clint A. Jensen: University of Wisconsin - Madison; Timothy T Rogers: University of Wisconsin- Madison; Brittany G. Travers: University of Wisconsin-Madison; Heather Kirkorian: University of Wisconsin-Madison; Karl Rosengren: University of Rochester

Unfolding Structure in the Drawings of Cubes

A suppression of the cortical beta rhythm is a ubiquitous neural correlate of action observation. However, it remains unclear to which extent low-level action detection and higher-order recognition of actions’ kinematics and goals contribute to beta suppression. Here, 24 participants, equipped with EEG, watched videos of kinematically natural goal-intact (Normal), kinematically unnatural goal-intact (How), and kinematically natural goal-violating (What) actions. We investigated the beta suppression at the time of action onset and at the time of action recognition. Across conditions, the beta rhythm was suppressed at action onset above both hemispheres, and no further change in the already suppressed beta rhythm was observed at the time of action recognition. Furthermore, beta suppression did not differ between Normal, How, and What videos. In conclusion, beta suppression is an ubiquitous characteristic of action observation but does not seem to be sensitive to the higher-order characteristics of observed action.

**Authors:**

Christian Marianov Georgiev: Université Libre de Bruxelles; Scott Mongold: Université libre de Bruxelles; Mathieu Bourguignon: Université Libre de Bruxelles

The contribution of low-level action detection and high-order action recognition on the sensorimotor beta rhythm suppression

Mice are increasingly used to study the neural circuitlevel basis of behavior, often with the ultimate goal to extrapolate these insights to humans. To generalize insights about neural functioning between species, it is crucial to first ensure correspondence in behavioral and
cognitive strategy. Here, we analyzed decision-making behavior in both humans and mice, and identified the same cognitive strategy of history-dependent evidence
accumulation. Specifically, individual differences in choice repetition were explained by a history-dependent bias in the rate of evidence accumulation – rather than
its starting point. Evidence integration over multiple temporal scales thus reflects a fundamental aspect of decision-making, conserved across mammalian species.
These findings set the stage for linking the computations of decision-making to neural dynamics at the single-cell and population levels.

**Authors:**

Anne Urai: Leiden University; Zeynep Gunes Gunes: Universitat de València; Kianté Fernandez: University of California, Los Angeles; Alexander Fengler: Brown University

Modelling History-Dependent Evidence Accumulation across Species

Dendrophilia — a widespread proclivity toward hierarchical behavior — has long been argued to be central to human cognitive uniqueness. Alternative views emphasize the developmental and evolutionary continuity of complex hierarchical psychological processes with simpler sequencing mechanisms. We investigated the predispositions of human adults and 3-to-6-year-old children to spontaneously generate hierarchical patterns in an open-ended sequence generation task. We also compared the human ability to learn hierarchical patterns with that of rhesus macaques and carrion crows. Our Bayesian mixture model quantified the extent to which distinct mechanisms — associative chaining, linear iteration, queues, and stacks — were implicated in hierarchical behavior. Our results suggest that hierarchical behavior is possible across species. It emerges early in cognitive development and may be scaffolded by simpler cognitive processes that eventually increase in representational and computational complexity. Thus, our findings contradict the dendrophilia hypothesis and point to shared psychological processes underpinning hierarchical behavior.

**Authors:**

Abhishek Dedhe: Carnegie Mellon University; Karishma Nicole Kulshrestha: Carnegie Mellon University; Steven Piantadosi: UC Berkeley; Jessica Cantlon: Carnegie Mellon

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Did you say Beer, Deer, or Gear? Exploring the McGurk effect using word stimuli

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