Netherlands

We propose a new account of concepts as specifically structured and handled mental files. We argue that concepts consist of two components, (a) an integrated network of associated information used for recognition and categorization of some types of entities (e.g. objects) according to properties, and (b) a handling system that organizes this associative network. A certain type of concept is determined by the package of associated information integrated in a mental file and the specific structure of this information including the specific way this information is handled. With this framework, we can account for the large variety of concepts including everyday concepts of individual objects and properties, scientific concepts, natural kind concepts and phenomenal concepts.

**Authors:**

Francesco Marchi: Ruhr University Bochum; Albert Newen: Ruhr-Universität Bochum

CogSci 2024

Concepts are specifically structured and handled mental files

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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#### 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. 
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* **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.
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* **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.
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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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.
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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.

A popular class of models of opinion dynamics involves averaging of opinions. Evidence for opinion averaging has also been found in behavioural studies of opinion dynamics. Finally, opinion averaging is a common means of judgment aggregation that is used in the service of crowd wisdom effects. In this paper, we use simulations with agent-based mod- els to highlight contexts in which opinion averaging leads to poor outcomes. Specifically, we illustrate the conditions under which the optimal posterior prescribed by a normative model of Bayesian argument exchange diverges from the mean belief that would be arrived at via simple averaging. The theoretical and practical implications of this are discussed.

**Authors:**

Ulrike Hahn: Birkbeck, University of London; Leon Assaad: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Jason W. Burton: Copenhagen Business School

Opinion Averaging versus Argument Exchange

Among the many fascinating findings to come out of the numerical cognition literature, subitizing – the ability to quickly, effortlessly, and accurately identify the number of items in small collections – has been studied extensively by researchers from a wide variety of disciplines. Despite hundreds of studies targeting this phenomenon, the identity of the cognitive systems that explain the unique features of subitizing remains unknown. One prominent account is that of Trick and Pylyshyn (1994), which is based on parallel individuation of visual indexes. Despite its promise, a few researchers have questioned its validity, due to experiments showing that attentional load influences enumeration performance. This paper offers a re-interpretation of some studies on the nature of the relation between subiziting and attention in order to help clear up in which sense subitizing depends on attentive and pre-attentive processes, offering a defense of Trick and Pylyshyn’s influential model.

**Authors:**

Jean-Charles Pelland: University of Bergen

Subitizing, Visual Indexes, and Attention

Investigating how people evaluate more or less complex explanations has been a focal point of research. However, previous studies have either focused on choice between a limited set of explanations or do not systematically quantify the explanations' complexity. We provide a new approach for modeling explanation selection that foregrounds the balance between observed and latent structure in the mechanism being explained. We combine a Bayesian framework with program induction, enabling coverage of unbounded partially observable model space through sampling, and reflecting how a simplicity bias emerges naturally in this setting. Through simulation, we identify two novel principles: (1) simpler explanations should be favored as latent uncertainty (the number of hidden variables) increases; (2) latent structure is attributed a larger role when the observable patterns become less compressible. We found that these principles were reflected in human judgments, indicating that people are sensitive to latent uncertainty when selecting between explanations.

**Authors:**

Tianwei Gong: University of Edinburgh; Simon Valentin: University of Edinburgh; Chris Lucas: University of Edinburgh; Neil R. Bramley: University of Edinburgh

Paradoxical parsimony: How latent complexity favors explanatory simplicity

Although research in the area of belief updating has flourished in the last two decades, most studies do not treat beliefs as part of a complex and interactive network. In this study, we investigate humans' use of auxiliary hypotheses as a mechanism to avoid belief updating in light of conflicting information. In Experiment 1, we replicate an unpublished study by Kahneman and Tversky, introducing two additional domain conditions (N=119). Participants construct an initial model, express a prior belief, and face conflicting information. They are then prompted to provide an explanation. Across domains, only 37% of responses attribute the conflict to the original report's invalidity. In Experiment 2 (N=29), a within-participants manipulation of credibility shows no effect on generating auxiliary hypotheses. Even in the presence of credibility cues to explain away information conflicts, participants generated auxiliary hypotheses to resolve them in 27% of the cases.

**Authors:**

Trisevgeni Papakonstantinou: University College London; Kuan Iao Leong: University College London; David Lagnado: University College London

Humans generate auxiliary hypotheses to resolve conflicts in observational data

The classical (symbol system) theory of cognition is supposed to explain systematicity---the coexistence of cognitive abilities. However, the classical theory does not explain why cognitive systems should be symbolic, nor why cognition sometimes fail to be systematic, so the symbol system assumption is seen by some as ad hoc: motivated only to fit the data. A mathematical theory is presented as a framework towards addressing these questions in terms of the available cognitive resources and the intended goals. A cognitive system is supposed to be resource-dependent and goal-driven. Accordingly, systematicity, or lack thereof follows from a universal construction principle (in a category theory sense) in this context---systems of symbols arise (or, fail to arise) as the "best" possible mapping given the available resources and the intended goal.

**Authors:**

Steven Phillips: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

Universal cognition in the context of resources and goals

In this paper, we confront two prevailing views of rationality–reason- and coherence-based theories–with empirical facts. While the experimental resolution of the debate between both theories is challenging, we examine two cases in which these theories make distinct predictions regarding whether an agent is deemed rational or not. By directly pitting reason-based against coherence-based theories, our findings indicate that reasons play a more influential role in shaping people's attributions of rationality than coherence. This result presents a dilemma for coherence-based theorists. They face the choice of either retracting their assertion that a theory of rationality should be grounded in our everyday understanding or acknowledging the potential misguidance in their emphasis on coherence. In contrast, reason-based theorists appear to have the upper hand.

**Authors:**

Kevin Reuter: University of Zurich; Michael Messerli: University if Zurich

Rationality Meets Facts

In this paper, we explore the objective-Bayesian principle of minimum information and Maximum Entropy as a solution to the problem of awareness growth: how should rational agents adjust their beliefs upon becoming aware of new possibilities? We introduce the Maximum Entropy principle as a theoretical solution to the problem of awareness growth and present the results of two experiments conducted to compare human reasoners' responses with the theoretical prescriptions of the Maximum Entropy approach. We discover that, although the MaxEnt method may appear computationally demanding, participants' responses are largely consistent with the theoretical prescription.

**Authors:**

Rafael Fuchs: Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich; Marko Tesic: Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge; Ulrike Hahn: Birkbeck, University of London

Testing the Maximum Entropy Approach to Awareness Growth in Bayesian Epistemology and Decision Theory

Decades of research have examined the consequences of disagreement, both negative (harm to relationships) and positive (fostering learning opportunities). Yet the psychological mechanisms underlying disagreement judgments themselves are poorly understood. Much research assumes that disagreement tracks divergence: the difference between two individuals’ beliefs with respect to a proposition. We test divergence as a theory of interpersonal disagreement through two experiments (N = 60, N = 60) and predictive models. Our data and modeling show that judgments of disagreement track divergence, but also the direction and extremity of beliefs. Critically, disagreement judgments track key social judgments (e.g., inferences of warmth, competence, and bias) above and beyond divergence, with notable variation across domains.

**Authors:**

Kerem Oktar: Princeton; John Branson Byers: Princeton University; Tania Lombrozo: Princeton University

Are Disagreements Just Differences in Beliefs?

For contractualist accounts of morality, actions are moral if they correspond to what rational agents would agree to do, were they to negotiate explicitly. This, in turn, often depends on each party’s bargaining power and on their outside options: what each of them could get in the absence of agreement. If there is an asymmetry, with one party enjoying higher bargaining power than another, this party can usually get a better deal — as often happens in real negotiations. A strong test of contractualist accounts of morality, then, is whether moral judgments do take bargaining power into account. We explore this in three preregistered experiments (n = 1,616). We construct scenarios depicting everyday interactions between two parties in which one of them can perform a mutually beneficial but unpleasant action. We find that the same actions (asking the other to perform the unpleasant action, or explicitly refusing to do it) are perceived as less morally appropriate when performed by the party with worse outside options, as compared to the party with better outside options. Thus, participants tend to give more moral leeway to the party with higher bargaining power, and to hold the disadvantaged party to stricter moral standards. This effect appears to depend only on the relative ordering of outside options, but not the magnitude of the difference between them. We discuss implications for contractualist theories of moral cognition and the emergence and persistence of unfair norms and inequality.

**Authors:**

Arthur Le Pargneux: University of Warwick; Fiery Cushman: Harvard University

Bargaining power, outside options, and moral judgment

People sometimes display moral flexibility by deciding that a commonly accepted moral norm ought not to apply in particular circumstances. But how? We explore this question in the context of queuing. We show that people's judgements about the moral permissibility of queue-cutting can be explained through cognitive processes related to moral contractualism: universalization, virtual bargaining, and functional thinking. Participants, both adults and young children, were presented vignettes depicting prospective line-cutters, and asked whether it was morally permissible to line-cut in those circumstances. We model these judgements with reference to the existence of a game-theoretic equilibrium supporting queue cutting in a repeated game, and to considerations of whether queue cutting would subvert or enact the function of a queue: if you pay the waiting cost, you should get the reward. These results support the notion that moral flexibility is in part related to contractualist moral principles.

**Authors:**

Joshua P White: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rahul Bhui: MIT; Fiery Cushman: Harvard University; Josh Tenenbaum: MIT; Sydney Levine: Allen Institute for AI

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