The phenomenon of belief polarisation, in which people update their beliefs in opposing directions, particularly after observing the same evidence has garnered growing attention and concern in recent years from across the fields of philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology, particularly as misinformation and ideological polarisation have threatened the fabric of political and social consensus (Allcott et al., 2019; Haghtalab et al., 2020; Lelkes, 2016; Wilson et al., 2020). Despite the recognition of belief polarisation as an emerging social phenomenon (or perhaps thanks to its very existence) both by scientific researchers and major social institutions such as governments and business, there has been relatively little work aiming to explicitly unify various strands of theorising regarding the causes of belief polarisation and strategies for addressing its consequences.

**Organisers and Presenters:**
* Rebekah Gelpi: Johns Hopkins University
* Daphna Buchsbaum: Brown University
* Jens Koed Madsen: London School of Economics
* David J. Young: University of Cambridge

W1: Rational revision? Bridging computational, empirical, and theoretical perspectives on belief updating and polarisation

Cognitive scientists have long sought to explain the human capability to solve complex and often ill-defined problems, ranging from puzzle games to the challenges of everyday life. Early work cast problem solving as search: given a fixed representation of states, actions, and transitions, an agent must find a sequence of actions that carries it from an initial state to a goal state, often guided by heuristic search. This framework proved successful in explaining human behavior in lab-controlled puzzle tasks, where experimenters could hand-craft fixed problem representations, allowing models to focus analysis on the downstream search process. Yet, it left a more fundamental question comparatively unexplored: how do humans construct the problem representations that make search possible in the first place?  

For more information visit the [Framing the Problem website](https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fframing-the-problem.github.io%2fcogsci2026.html&c=E,1,Vdf8CuQ6BmgpyQWY2q-zpju2DUCij2-2ZMVEpc5M8_bkQTggzNw79zSUnd538a0-acga9-Dw3pQjuPhuGRxJ9749whFfzEVRsWu_ul1AfkWiCWHcsA,,&typo=1).

**Organisers and Presenters:** 
* David G. Nagy: TU Darmstadt
* Hanqi Zhou: University of Tuebingen
* Shuze Liu: Harvard University
* Tracey Mills: MIT
* Tony Chen: MIT
* Zergham Ahmed: Harvard University
* Mark Ho: New York University

W2: Framing the problem: Abstraction and task representations in human problem solving​

Foundation models, large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained on vast amounts of data and able to engage with a wide range of tasks, have captivated public attention and promise transformative impact across many fields, from mathematics to education. The capacity for such models to fluidly engage in natural language carries huge potential implications for cognitive science: for the first time, we have computational models that bring us a significant step toward the generality of human cognition, thereby inviting us to reconceptualize how we may build models of the human mind. Yet, major questions remain as to how to build such models, what kind of data is needed for this, and what the implications are for cognitive science.

**Organisers & Presenters:**
* Marcel Binz: Helmholtz Munich 
* Katherine M Collins: MIT 
* Lance Ying: Harvard University 
* Joshua B. Tenenbaum: MIT 
* Eric Schulz: Helmholtz Munich

W3: Laying the foundations for foundation models of cognition

Humans are social beings, and intentional communication is the backbone of how people share what they are thinking, coordinate over long periods of time, and learn from each others ideas. People have finely attuned capacities for inferring each others mental states, but intentional communication offers a much richer and more direct window into someone else’s thoughts than passive mind-reading alone.

**Organisers and Presenters:** 
* Arnav Verma: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
* Lionel Wong: Stanford University
* Matthew Caren: Stanford University
* Robert Hawkins: Stanford University
* Arvind Satyanarayan: MIT 
* Judith E. Fan: Stanford University

W4: Unconventional communication: making meaning across modalities

Science is an exercise in seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants. But what happens when those shoulders give way? The replication crisis has shaken confidence in published findings, with surveys revealing that more than 70% of researchers have failed to replicate another scientist’s experiments (Baker, 2016). Even when researchers attempt the seemingly simpler task of computational reproducibility, applying the same analysis to the same data’s success is far from guaranteed. A recent large-scale investigation found that only 52.6% of social and behavioral science papers could be precisely reproduced, even when original data were available (Miske et al., 2026). The costs are substantial: wasted resources, delayed discoveries, and eroded public trust in science.

**Organiser and Presenter:** 
* Jordan W. Suchow: Stevens Institute of Technology


Tutorial 1: A tutorial on computationally reproducible research

One of the fundamental questions in cognitive science is how people achieve such high levels of performance given the very limited resources they have access to. While human behaviour is similar to the Bayesian ideal both in low-level domains such as vision (Yuille & Kersten, 2006) and high-level domains such as categorization (Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007); optimality is in fact impossible given existing constraints.

**Organisers and Presenters:** 
* Lucas Castillo: University of Warwick
* Cheng Stella Qian: University of Warwick
* Adam Sanborn: University of Warwick


Tutorial 2:  Autocorrelated sampling in cognition: Implementing MCMC models and fitting them without likelihoods

Modern AI systems are increasingly, and perhaps alarmingly, exceeding human performance in domains such as competition mathematics and coding (UK AISI, 2025). AI agents can now independently implement software engineering artifacts requiring hours of complex reasoning effort from humans. As AI capability and agency increase, designing reliable mechanisms to align AI systems, ensuring they act consistently with human values even when unmonitored, grows ever more urgent. Yet AI alignment remains poorly understood.

**Organisers and Presenters:** 
* Konstantinos Voudouris: UK AI Security Institute
* Xavier Roberts-Gaal: Harvard University
* Neil R. Bramley: University of Edinburgh 
* Ilia Sucholutsky: New York University
* Christopher Summerfield: UK AI Security Institute

W5: The Cognitive Science of AI Alignment

While cognitive science has been an official part of higher education institutions for four decades, there is an enormous range of institutional structures and curricula that support such training. This diversity, particularly curricular diversity, has been taken as a symptom of a lack of disciplinary coherence (Nunez et al., 2019). However, systematic coordination of training across the field remains limited, leaving individual institutions to address pedagogical, administrative, and sociohistorical challenges alone. This workshop aims to address this gap by bringing together faculty currently running or building higher education programs in Cognitive Science across the world, including those at universities in South America. The structure of the workshop is designed to allow faculty managing a variety of different programs in various higher education contexts to surface existing and emerging issues, brainstorm and share potential solutions, and identify priorities for creating shared resources.

**Organisers and Presenters:** 
* Jonathan Phillips: Dartmouth College
* Wednesday Bushong: Wellesley College
* Andre M. Cravo: Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC)
* Zoe Drayson: University of California, Davis
* Matt Dye: Rochester Institute of Technology
* Michael C. Frank: Stanford University
* Adrian Garcia-Sierra: University of Connecticut
* Sam Johnson: University of Waterloo
* Tiago Torrent: Federal University of Juiz de Fora
* Dimitris Xygalatas: University of Connecticut
* Matthew Goldrick: Northwestern University

W6: Creating and Sustaining Cognitive Science Higher Education Programs

Cognitive scientists spend much of their professional training learning how to explain empirical research to one another: in talks, papers, posters, grant proposals, and conference discussions. An integral part of our training is the communication and dissemination of scientific ideas at an expert level. Far less attention is given to translating that same work for communities beyond academia. This gap matters because cognitive science produces findings about learning, reasoning, attention, memory, communication, development, decision making, and human-technology interactional topics that many members of the public already encounter in everyday life. Cognitive research is fascinating, relevant, and often meets urgent needs. Yet when research findings circulate without context, they can be misunderstood, oversimplified, or mistrusted. People may not trust what they cannot understand, and many misunderstandings begin at a basic level: what empirical research is or looks like, what evidence can show, and crucially, why scientific claims are often conditional and open to revision.

**Organisers and Presenters:**
* Lauren Girouard-Hallam: University of Michigan
* Marcelo Viridiano: Federal University of Juiz de Fora
* Jessica Chomik: McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT


W7: From finding to feed: Translating Empirical Research for Social Media

Large-scale spatial abilities have long been recognized as a central component of human cognition, underlying navigation, wayfinding, and the integration of spatial information across extended environments. Despite their importance for everyday functioning and learning, these abilities have remained comparatively underrepresented in standardized assessment research. Widely used instruments such as mental rotation or spatial visualization tests target situations in which spatial information can be apprehended from a single viewpoint and manipulated without bodily movement (small-scale spatial abilities). Research has repeatedly shown that performance on such tasks overlaps only partially with performance in navigation and wayfinding, suggesting that large-scale spatial abilities involve additional cognitive processes related to embodiment, sequential decision-making, and the integration of spatial information over time. While small-scale spatial abilities are routinely measured using well-established psychometric instruments, large-scale spatial abilities are most commonly investigated using navigation tasks that are tailored to specific experimental settings. As a consequence, studies often rely on highly heterogeneous environments, task designs, and outcome measures, which substantially limits comparability and standardization across studies.

**Organisers and Presenters:**
* Angela Schwering: University of Muenster
* Helen Mueller: Institute for Geoinformatics


Tutorial 3: Assessing Large-Scale Spatial Abilities in Real and Virtual Environments

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2026!

The 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

The Cognitive Science Society plans to host a fully synchronous hybrid conference for 2026 Rio de Janeiro. Therefore all presenters will have the option to present in-person in Rio, or virtually, from anywhere in the world. Similarly, attendance will be available both in-person in Rio, and virtually. Post conference, there will be an ‘on-demand’ service making all presentations accessible to all for 24 calendar months. 

<div style="position:relative;padding-top:0;width:900px;height:500px;"><iframe style="position:absolute;border:none;width:100%;height:100%;left:0;top:0;" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/CogSci-2026-program/" title="Podium-CogSci 2026-program-v106" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>

#### Letter from the President
Welcome to the 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society! I’m delighted that many members of our community have gathered here in Rio de Janeiro. This year marks the first time that the conference has been held in South America, and only the second time it has been held in the Southern Hemisphere. We are an international society, which makes it important for the conference to circulate between all of the regions in which cognitive scientists live and work.

Students are a key part of our community and this year the Cognitive Science Society (CSS) is proud to encourage student participation by providing roughly three times as many student travel awards as normal. I extend a special welcome to students and others who are attending the conference for the first time, and hope that this community will become your intellectual home and that you will be inspired to return in the future.

Attending in person is not possible for many members of our community, and the CSS remains committed to facilitating remote participation. This year’s conference is fully hybrid, and researchers from all around the world will be joining us online to present their work and listen to on-site presentations. The Japanese Cognitive Science Society has also organized a satellite event in Hamamatsu, Japan, and researchers will be gathering there on July 23 and July 24 to interact with each other and engage with material streamed from Rio.

This year’s conference is made possible by the hard work of many people. Many thanks to Gemma Boleda, Isabelle Dautriche, Mora Maldonado, Carmen Saldana, and Tiago Torrent for their tireless efforts in organizing this year’s scientific program. They have assembled an extraordinary set of invited talks and symposia and spent many hours coordinating the review process for member submissions. Thanks also to Marischal De Armond, Cendrine De Vis, Emily Heffernan Ho, Jude Ross, and Rachel Waller from Podium Conferences for their support of our society and for adeptly handling all of the logistical issues involved with the conference. Special thanks to CSS Executive Officer Stephanie Denison not only for her vital role in planning the conference but also for keeping all of the Society’s many activities on track.

The CSS Governing Board works around the year on tasks related to the conference along with initiatives related to mentorship, outreach, communications, industry, higher education, and many other areas. If you’d like to get involved, please visit us at the Governing Board poster at one of the conference poster sessions this year. Our community is also supported by the many scholars who serve on the editorial teams for the two society journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science. Many thanks to all involved, and especially to the  executive editors of the journals, Rick Dale and Andrea Bender.

Over the next few days I hope that you will discover new ideas, develop new collaborations, and make new friends. Thank you for your part in making this a memorable experience for all of us.

**Charles Kemp**
President, Cognitive Science Society

#### About

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.

#### Our History 

* **Society Creation**<br>
The Society was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts in 1979. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. 
<br><br>
* **Conference Creation**<br>
The first conference on cognitive science was held at La Jolla, California in August, 1979, and has occurred annually since then. The proceedings of each conference are published, and those from most years are available through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The annual proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference represent a major source of information on new work and new ideas in the scientific study of thinking. In 1990, the Society, with help from an anonymous donor, established the David Marr Prize for the best student paper at each annual meeting.
<br><br>
* **Journal Creation**<br>
The Journal, Cognitive Science, began publication in 1976, and is now published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Executive Editor is currently Richard P. Cooper of Birkbeck, University of London, and there are 18 Associate Editors and a 30-member editorial board. It serves as the premier outlet for research reports that intersect two or more disciplines. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society. The Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society voted in late 2006 to found a new journal, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). The Editor in Chief is Wayne Gray, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The journal seeks to fill a niche not occupied by Cognitive Science Journal or other cognitive science journals. Membership in the Society includes a subscription to Cognitive Science and TopiCS. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society.

#### Code of Conduct
By attending the CogSci 2026 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s [**Code of Conduct**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VWW9nG9kODPR-FxPDA67SvZma-BmxcCx/view?usp=sharing).
<br><br>


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CogSci 2026

The 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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