Netherlands

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&#39;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&#39; 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

CogSci 2024

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

### Looking for Cogsci 2023? Please [click here](https://underline.io/events/405/reception) to switch to 2023 edition.


**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

**Your Program Chairs,**
![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/99984908caba5e6453e5fc5ba34f3507.jpg)

**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


CogSci 2021

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.

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

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**<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.
<br><br>

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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.

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

Spontaneous Algorithms of Hierarchical Behavior Across Age and Species

Sustained attention is a fundamental cognitive ability that influences various aspects of human functioning. Studies of the neural correlates of attention commonly treat sustained attention as an isolated construct, however in any ecological context, sustained attention interacts with other executive functions such as inhibition of interference and processing of complex hierarchical stimuli. We have thus constructed a protocol to probe the interplay between these cognitive processes during visual attention task. We contrast putative typical vs atypical attention by comparing 18 healthy participants with 53 adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, for whom difficulties with sustained attention are a core symptom and thus constitute a natural experiment condition. Our behavioural and brain-imaging analyses demonstrate distinct neural patterns in bottom-up visual processing and attention allocation mechanisms in ADHD and Control groups, highlighting different cognitive strategies utilised by adults with ADHD and healthy participants in tasks requiring sustained attention.

**Authors:**

Elizaveta Kuznetsova: University of Helsinki; Tuisku Tammi: University of Helsinki; Natalia Postnova: University of Helsinki; Jussi Palomäki: Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare; Benjamin Cowley: University of Helsinki

Neurotypical Adults employ Distinct Cognitive Strategies compared to Adults with ADHD during a Sustained Attention Task with Gestalt Stimuli

Causal reasoning enables us to explain the past, predict the future, and intervene in the present. Does the brain allocate specialized cortical regions to causal reasoning? And if so, are they involved in reasoning about both physical and social causal relationships, or are they domain-specific? In a pre-registered experiment (Exp 1) we scanned adults using fMRI while they matched physical and social causes to effects (e.g., ‘The car swerved to avoid a crash’ -> ‘Coffee spilled all over the car seat’; ‘He was late for work’ -> ‘Tom was scolded by his boss’) or physical and social descriptions of the same entity matched for difficulty and linguistic variables to the causal conditions (e.g., ‘The brightest object in the sky’-> ‘The closest star to earth’; ‘She works at a hotel’ -> ‘She brings in guests’ luggage’). A region in the left lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) responded significantly more strongly to causal than descriptive conditions in most subjects individually. Responses in this region in held-out data were high for both social and physical causal conditions, yet no greater than baseline for the two descriptive (non-causal) conditions. In a follow-up exploratory experiment (Exp 2), we tested a different task (answering causal versus non-causal questions about physical and social narratives, matched for linguistic variables). Again, we found that both the physical and social causal stimuli selectively engaged the LPFC region. Finally, in both experiments, we found that brain regions previously implicated in intuitive physical reasoning responded more to the physical causal than the physical non-causal stimuli. Collectively, these results suggest that a) a region in the LPFC is selectively engaged in causal reasoning independent of content domain and b) the hypothesized physics network (hPN) is selectively involved in physical causal reasoning across modalities (visual vs. linguistic).

**Authors:**

RT Pramod: MIT; Jessica Chomik: McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT; Laura Schulz: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Nancy Kanwisher: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A region in human left prefrontal cortex selectively engaged in causal reasoning

Cognitive scientists continue to debate gender/sex differences in basic problem-solving, including numerical and spatial cognition. While such differences may exist in adulthood, it is unclear whether these cognitive skills are fixed (early-developing, permanent) or plastic (late-developing, malleable). If fixed, they would relate more to gender categories; if plastic, they would relate more to gender socialization and spatial learning environment. To disentangle these hypotheses, we measured brain activity with fMRI in 51 children (4-8y; 20 boys / 31 girls) during numerical (vs. face) and geometric (vs. word) processing tasks. Greater activity occurred in superior and inferior parietal cortex during numerical and geometric processing compared to control conditions, but activity was unrelated to gender category, gender socialization, or spatial learning environment. These initial findings challenge the hypothesis of early, fixed gender effects in numerical and spatial development. Bayesian analyses will quantify support for the null vs. experimental hypotheses, incorporating additional environmental predictors.

**Authors:**

Marissa Laws: Carnegie Mellon University; Jessica Cantlon: Carnegie Mellon

Plasticity, gender, and the environment during numerical and spatial development

Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) is an efficient neuromodulation technique to enhance cognitive function in a non-invasive manner. Using electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, it was investigated whether a tACS with different phase lags between central executive and default mode networks modulated cognitive performance in perception, working memory, and inhibitory control. It was found that phase-lag-dependent tACS mediated improvement in task performance, neurodynamically reflected in task-relevant cortical and subcortical activation as well as prefrontal-based top-down functional connectivity. Our observations provide neurophysiological correlates of network-wise tACS-phase-dependent neuromodulation and a feasible non-invasive approach to effectively modulate fundamental cognitive functions.

**Authors:**

Byoung-Kyong Min: Korea University

Network-wise transcranial alternating current stimulation with phase lags

Measuring and quantifying degrees of belief poses a fundamental challenge, prompting an exploration into how humans navigate uncertainty. This study challenges the conventional use of probability theory and investigates ranking theory as a viable alternative model. Across the initial three experiments (N = 168; N = 63; N = 200), participants consistently utilized negative ranking functions to express disbelief, revealing a robust pattern across diverse contexts. Notably, a logarithmic relationship emerged between subjective probability and negative ranks (degree of disbelief). Experiment 3 provided clarity regarding the association between subjective probability and two-sided ranks (degree of disbelief and belief), establishing a log-odds relationship. In Experiment 4 (N = 268) the examination of ranks and subjective probability in a learning task revealed that degrees of disbelief more accurately represented the objective probability distribution than subjective probability. Lastly, Experiment 5 (N = 291) addressed decision-making under uncertainty through the Ellsberg paradox, uncovering how ranking theory not only resolved contradictions with expected utility theory but also eliminated the paradoxical nature of the Ellsberg scenario. This study advances our understanding of human uncertainty and supports ranking theory as a compelling alternative.

**Authors:**

Hanbin Go: University of Waterloo; Britt Anderson: University of Waterloo

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