United States

Although infants can frequently observe others gathering information, it is an open question whether and how they make sense of such activities since the mental causes and intended effects of these are hidden and underdetermined by the available evidence. We tested the hypothesis that infants possess a naive theory that leads them to grasp the purpose of information-gathering actions when they serve as sub-goals of higher-order instrumental goals. We presented 14-month-old infants with actions that were inefficient with respect to the agent’s instrumental goal but could or could not be justified as information-seeking behavior via this theory. We expected longer looks in the condition where the detour could not be justified and the results were in line with our predictions. While this evidence is compatible with our hypothesis, further studies are in progress to rule out alternative interpretations of our findings.

CogSci 2021

Infants’ interpretation of information-seeking actions

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**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,**
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**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/).


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.

technical paper

Context effects in human spoken language are well-documented and play a central role in the theory of language production. However, the role of context in written language production is far less well understood, even though a considerable proportion of the language produced by many people today is written. Here we analyze the factors predictive of English language typing times in a large, naturalistic corpus from the popular TypeRacer.com website. We find broad consistency with the major documented effects of linguistic context on spoken language production, suggesting potential modality-independence in the cognitive mechanisms underlying language production and/or similar optimization pressures on the production systems in both modalities

On Factors Influencing Typing Time: Analyzing TypeRacer’s Massive Open Access Dataset

Dual-process accounts posit that human learning can occur as a consequence of both associative and propositional processes. This can be contrasted with single process accounts that suggest learning is entirely propositional. In this paper, we offer evidence for both associative and propositional processes using a within-subjects two alternative forced choice discrimination paradigm. Stimuli that varied concurrently along two dimensions were created and each participant’s awareness was directed toward one, facilitating rule induction (i.e., propositional processing) on that dimension. Performance on the other dimension was then used to assess associatively-based performance. We report results that are initially inconsistent with both single process and dual-process accounts of discrimination learning. However, we then show how an associative network, that represents stimuli integrally, can predict the performance shown by participants in the experiment, providing evidence for a dual-process account.

Dual Processes on Dual Dimensions: Associative and Propositionally-Mediated Discrimination and Peak Shift.

For a gesture to be successful, observers must recognize its communicative purpose. Are communicators sensitive to this problem and do they try to ease their observer’s inferential burden? We propose that people shape their gestures to help observers easily infer that their movements are meant to communicate. Using computational models of recursive goal inference, we show that this hypothesis predicts that gestures ought to reveal that the movement is inconsistent with the space of non-communicative goals in the environment. In two gesture-design experiments, we find that people spontaneously shape communicative movements in response to the distribution of potential instrumental goals, ensuring that the movement can be easily differentiated from instrumental action. Our results show that people are sensitive to the inferential demands that observers face. As a result, people actively work to help ensure that the goal of their communicative movement is understood.

I Know You Know I’m Signaling: Novel gestures are designed to guide observers’ inferences about communicative goals

Games have been integral to the development of cognitive science. As experimental tasks, games can provide an ideal environment for studying questions about mental representation, memory, and strategic decision making. Here, we explore the potential of memory matching games as an experimental task by using a simple online version to conceptually replicate two classic effects from the cognitive scientific literature—the picture superiority effect (Paivio & Csapo, 1973) and the word length effect (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975). We manipulate the Item Format of the game pieces (pictures vs. words) and their Label Length (short vs. long). As expected, we find a picture superiority effect. We do not find the predicted word length effect. We argue that the results of the study, along with several practical properties of the task, sup- port the use of the game for cognitive scientific research.

Exploring mental representation with a memory matching game

To cope with the pandemic, we need first to predict it. How does the human brain model epidemic dynamics? In February and March 2020, we conducted an online diary study, where each participant completed 14 days of predictions about the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic in China. Over 400 Chinese adults participated in our study, spanning a total of 40 days. On the group level, we find participants’ predictions of the ending date of the epidemic are correlated with daily new cases. Modeling analysis shows that participants’ predictions agree with a Gaussian process model that generalizes observed case numbers to the future by similarity-based function learning, but deviate from an ideal epidemic model. On the individual level, we find individuals’ pandemic predictions are correlated with their psychological traits or states, such as future time perspective and negative emotions (anxiety, depression, and stress).

Folk theory of epidemics: insights from a 14-day diary study during COVID-19

Direction giving involves diverse cognitive processes such as creating a mental map, following the desired route and choosing the correct terminology to provide directions efficiently. Many perceived differences have been speculated in the speech of men and women, yet research on spontaneous direction giving differences based on gender is limited. This small-scale qualitative study uses Cognitive Discourse Analysis to investigate whether men and women differ in the frequency of usage of projective terms, cardinal directions, hedges, modal verbs, landmarks, serial orientation measures and distance indicators in route directions. The patterns emerging consistently through the results show that gender plays an important role in the provision of directions. Key results included a utilization of humor by women when direction giving, as well as a higher usage of landmarks and hedges than men. Key results contradicting previous findings showed no usage of cardinal directions by either gender, as well as the serial orientation marker ‘then’ being utilized more by women rather than men.

Just Following Directions! The Effects of Gender on Direction Giving

Different patterns of lines can express different emotions, but the reason for the metaphor has not been fully revealed. Some studies speculate that this may be caused by the motion implied by lines. In order to verify this speculation, this paper conducts an experiment on the relationship between the emotional expression of lines and the motion of lines. We created 87 different patterns of lines and visualized the motion implied by the lines as dynamic effects. The subjects chose descriptors from a list of 29 emotion words for samples. The results show that the test samples can well cover the classical two-dimensional emotional space and the emotional expression of lines is obviously related to their implied motion. The implied motion, compared with the static version, tends to shift towards the positive and high arousal in the emotional space. In addition, the speed of the motion affects emotional arousal.

Is the emotional mapping of lines caused by the motion they imply?

Humans have a remarkable capacity to make intuitive predictions about physical scenes. Recent studies suggest that this capacity recruits a general-purpose “physics engine” that reliably simulates how scenes will unfold. Here, we complicate this picture by introducing knots to the study of intuitive physics. Three experiments reveal that even basic judgments about knots strain human physical reasoning.
Experiment 1-2 presented photographs of simple knots and asked participants to judge each knot’s relative strength. Strikingly, observers reliably ranked weaker knots as strong and stronger knots as weak. Experiment 3 presented photographs of tangled strings and asked participants whether the tangle forms a knot when pulled. When shown a tangle that would not form a knot when pulled taut, subjects were at or near chance discriminating knots from non-knots. These failures challenge the domain-generality of physical reasoning mechanisms, and perhaps suggest that soft-body phenomena recruit different cognitive processes than rigid-body physics.

Tangled Physics: Knots as a challenge for physical scene understanding

The use of face masks is one of the measures adopted by the general community to stop the transmission of disease during this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This wide use of face masks has indeed been shown to disrupt day-to-day face recognition. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have predisposed impairment in face recognition and are expected to be more vulnerable to this disruption in face recognition. When faces were initially learned unobstructed, we showed that people with higher autistic traits had a lower face recognition performance for masked faces. In contrast, there was a stronger facilitation in subsequent face recognition of masked faces in typically developing adults, but not in adults with ASD, when masked faces were learned first—this face recognition facilitation is predicted by a higher level of empathy. This paper also discusses how autistic traits and empathy influence processing of faces with and without face masks.

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On Factors Influencing Typing Time: Analyzing TypeRacer’s Massive Open Access Dataset

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Peekbank: Exploring children's word recognition through an open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data

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Next from CogSci 2021

On Factors Influencing Typing Time: Analyzing TypeRacer’s Massive Open Access Dataset

Similar lecture

Peekbank: Exploring children's word recognition through an open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data

Downloads