Canada

Previous research has shown that proportions, ornateness, and lighting of indoor architectural spaces affect observers&#39; mental states (Negami &amp; Ellard 2021). However, most studies are limited to verbal self-reports, and focus either on photographs, or CAD-modeled rooms in which certain elements, (e.g. ceiling height), are experimentally manipulated. 
We study human psychological and physiological responses to historical indoor sites reconstructed in virtual reality (VR). Such spaces are often designed to evoke affective responses -- for example, sacred architecture is meant to evoke feelings of calm. Using drone footage, we record 3D geometry, visual and auditory sensory data of an indoor space.
We recreate the space in VR, and record humans’ eye-movements, heart-rate, galvanic skin response, and reports of affective states, during free exploration. We propose a cognitive model that interprets physiological responses as information-foraging, and identify the correlates of reported changes in affective states with specific properties of architectural space.


CogSci 2022

Human Information Seeking in Architectural Spaces Simulated in Virtual Reality

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Previous research has shown that proportions, ornateness, and lighting of indoor architectural spaces affect observers' mental states (Negami & Ellard 2021). However, most studies are limited to verbal self-reports, and focus either on photographs, or CAD-modeled rooms in which certain elements, (e.g. ceiling height), are experimentally manipulated. 
We study human psychological and physiological responses to historical indoor sites reconstructed in virtual reality (VR). Such spaces are often designed to evoke affective responses -- for example, sacred architecture is meant to evoke feelings of calm. Using drone footage, we record 3D geometry, visual and auditory sensory data of an indoor space.
We recreate the space in VR, and record humans’ eye-movements, heart-rate, galvanic skin response, and reports of affective states, during free exploration. We propose a cognitive model that interprets physiological responses as information-foraging, and identify the correlates of reported changes in affective states with specific properties of architectural space.


technical paper

Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
 [**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Cogsci-2022-PAAG-Detailed-July-12final-1.pdf)
 [**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/DeArmond-CogSci2022-program-v113-final.pdf)

This conference requires a registration to attend. Please use the link below to secure your ticket. The website will be available to all registered attendees on July 25th. 

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The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





The “Direction and Orientation Strategy Questionnaire” (DOSQ) is a novel assessment based on giving directions around your hometown and how one remains oriented in real-world environments. The DOSQ produces three sub-scale scores: use of allocentric strategies, use of egocentric strategies, and sense-of-direction. Through an online survey, over one hundred Texas A&M undergraduates completed demographic questions, DOSQ, Santa Barbara Sense-of-Direction scale (Hegarty et al., 2002), Wayfinding Strategy Scale (Lawton, 1994), Questionnaire on Survey Representation (Pazzaglia & De Beni, 2006), Spatial Anxiety Scale (Lawton, 1994), and familiarity measures using the Texas A&M campus. Using factor analysis, we found that the DOSQ sub-scores were highly related to other measures of strategy use and sense-of-direction, establishing its convergent validity. DOSQ sub-scales were not related to the spatial anxiety or familiarity measures, establishing its discriminant validity. The DOSQ provides a method for briefly assessing spatial thinking strategies that support navigation through real-world environments.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity of the Direction and Orientation Strategy Questionnaire

From previous work we know that mechanical reasoning is associated with spatial skills, and that it could even be possible for mechanical reasoning training to lead to meaningful gains in spatial abilities. However, it is unknown whether the connection with mechanical reasoning applies to different types of spatial skills or is specific to only one or a subset of them. To answer this question, we presented participants with six different tasks, four of which corresponded to spatial assessments that were organized along a 2 (intrinsic/extrinsic) x 2 (static/dynamic) matrix of factors, and two evaluations that measured mechanical reasoning (gears and pulleys task and DAT-5 mechanical reasoning test). Three hundred adult participants from Chile responded from their personal computers to the stimuli presented on Open Lab, an online platform. The results shed light on the link between mechanical reasoning and the different subtypes of spatial skills.


What's the relationship between mechanical reasoning and different types of spatial skills?

Grammatical gender (GG) affects object categorization (e.g., Samuel et al., 2019). This study is among the first to examine the extent of this effect using both implicit and explicit tasks. Speakers of French (GG language) and Turkish (genderless) completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) about classifying faces based on their gender (female/male) and objects conceptually associated with a specific gender (e.g., necktie) based on a criterion unrelated to gender (tool/clothing item). Participants also completed an explicit task of attributing gender to those objects and a survey assessing sexist attitudes. Turkish speakers were only affected by conceptual gender (CG) whereas French speakers showed the effect of CG in their explicit gender attributions and of both GG and CG in their IAT responses. These effects were stronger for participants who were high in their sexist attitudes. Thus, GG implicitly interferes with object categorization, and individual differences in attitudes may modulate this effect.


Conceptual Gender vs. Grammatical Gender: Exploring Implicit and Explicit Object Categorization in Turkish and French Speakers

A foundational hypothesis in cognitive science is that some of human thinking happens in a language of thought (LoT), which is universal across humans (Fodor, 1975). According to this hypothesis, words in different natural languages are labels for primitive concepts or their combinations in LoT. What are LoT's primitives? This is a major challenge because LoT is not directly observable, and thus needs to be inferred or 'reverse-engineered'. We put forward a novel approach to reverse-engineering LoT, capitalizing on the existing knowledge about the optimization of the trade-off between complexity and informativeness in natural languages.


Reverse-engineering the language of thought: a new approach

From an early age, humans have access to the Approximate Number System (ANS), which allows an approximate sense of quantities. Several pieces of evidence show the emergence of a functional relationship between individual differences in ANS accuracy and mathematical performance, but the correlational nature of the studies do not allow us to clarify the nature of this relationship. In this study, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with a pre and post-test design, which aims to evaluate the hysteresis effect in modulating performance in an approximate quantity comparison task and the subsequent transfer effect on symbolic mathematical performance. One hundred and twenty-eight students from senior kindergarten and first grade of elementary school participated in this study. The results show a hysteresis effect in Reaction Time and efficiency index for First Grade, but no transfer effect to symbolic mathematical abilities was found.


Hysteresis in training task of Approximate Number System: transfer effect to symbolic math abilities

In order to successfully guide generalization of knowledge, category representation needs to be both: flexible enough to account for new evidence and stable enough to resist harmful change. Here we present a set of experiments designed to test how items that violate our expectations (i.e., category exceptions) affect category representation. Specifically, we wanted to know whether learning a category exception can change category boundaries. Does learning about penguins changes the way we think about birds? Do features of penguins contribute to making decisions as to whether a novel item is a bird? Across two experiments we found evidence that exceptions can change category boundaries and thus significantly affect future generalization. We discuss implications these findings have for the extent models of category learning and memory.


Category Exceptions Change Category Boundaries

Although expectancy effects induced by placebo treatment are reported to attenuate depressive symptoms in the long run, mechanisms underlying situational dynamics are not well understood. Improved reward learning has been discussed as a candidate mediator for effects of positive expectancies on more positive mood. Here, we fitted a series of Q-learning models to measure the effect of sham antidepressant treatment vs. open-label placebo in a probabilistic reinforcement learning task. Treatment effects were observed mainly in those Q-learning models justified by the task structure. Additionally, interindividual variability remained the largest origin of unexplained variance in predictive match across models. These findings provide further support for the role of expectancies in reward learning. They also highlight the need for unraveling individual differences in cognitive mechanisms that account for differences in reward learning, and obtaining reliable estimates for them.

Modeling Reward Learning Under Placebo Expectancies: A Q-Learning Approach

The goal of language learning should be to fit in with the language community, and this often requires much more than linguistic knowledge. Although both social wellness in a second language (L2) society and L2 humor comprehension require sophisticated social and cultural knowledge beyond linguistic proficiency, their direct association has not previously been tested. Here we developed a novel method to assess different stages of humor comprehension (i.e., detection and appreciation) and conducted a series of experiments to explore its relationship with subjective social well-being in non-native English speakers. The results revealed significant correlations between language anxiety and social connectedness with both humor detection and humor appreciation in the L2. The findings suggest that the ability of L2 humor detection can be a hallmark of pragmatic proficiency and social wellness in an L2 community.

The Association between Humor Comprehension and Subjective Social Well-being in Non-native English Speakers

Humor comprehension is a great challenge for foreign/second language (L2) learners. Previous studies on humor comprehension in L2 speakers have relied only on descriptive approaches or subjective ratings on humor materials. However, no study has quantitatively investigated the behavior of L2 speakers in different stages of humor comprehension including humor detection and appreciation. This study first developed/validated a novel method to separately assess joke detection and appreciation, and conducted a series of experiments to explore the difference between native and non-native English speakers. The results showed that the non-native speakers achieved significantly lower accuracy in the joke detection than the native speakers, whereas the appreciation ratings were comparable between them. The results suggested that the non-native speakers are not necessarily disadvantageous in the joke appreciation, but detection, compared with native speakers

Non-native English Speakers Are Not Disadvantageous in Humor Appreciation, but Detection, Compared with Native Speakers

Racial and gender bias, from advertisement to political rhetoric, is ubiquitous in persuasion. However, the impact of bias on persuasive discourse is often muddied by intent and framing. Reasoners practicing anti-racism may be more likely to scrutinize racially-specific arguments, while arguments made by women may only be diminished when they are emotionally charged. We sought to study how humans evaluate interpretive arguments, what makes certain arguments persuasive, and the impact of bias and emotionality on persuasiveness. We found that shallow heuristics such as argument length and readability are poor indicators for persuasive impact, but reasoners are more likely to be persuaded by arguments made by White people, particularly White women. Further, no difference was observed based on a reasoner's ability to see the arguer's face, implying that judgments are made solely by name recognition. Our focus on written arguments has broad implications for information literacy and racial justice.

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Convergent and Discriminant Validity of the Direction and Orientation Strategy Questionnaire

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