Netherlands

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&#39;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

CogSci 2024

Rationality Meets Facts

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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

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** 
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** 
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) 
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) 
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
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) 

**Friday, July 26** 
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) 
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture) 
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture) 
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) 

**Saturday, July 27** 
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) 
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture) 
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
<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/cble/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>


**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** 
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** 
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.

You need to log in with the email address you registered with. Access credentials have been sent to your email. 

Please be sure to check your spam and other email folders if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in to explore this event.

It looks like you are not registered for this event. 

To access the site please register [**here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/registration/). 

Please register!

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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

Moral flexibility in applying queuing norms can be explained by contractualist principles in children and adults

In this paper, we explore the Principle of Charity. This is an epistemic assumption that people should not judge people to be irrational unless they have an empirically justified account of what they are doing when they violate normative standards. Through two studies, we provide evidence in support of the principle. Study 1 suggests people believe others will arrive at the same conclusions they would themselves given the same information. Study 2 suggests that people assume others may differ in the subjective degrees of belief, but that they broadly use the same (Bayesian) updating mechanism when evaluating information about other people. We believe this paper provides the first empirical test of this principle.

**Authors:**

Jens Koed Madsen: London School of Economics; Mike Oaksford: Birkbeck, University of London; Nicole Lauren George: London Schools of Economics; Cassandra Teigen: London School of Economics and Political Science; Sayeh Yousefi: London School of Economics and Political Science

An Epistemic Principle of Charity in Informal Argument Evaluation

We often rely on others’ testimony when learning about new topics, such as health benefits of a novel food. However, the sources are not always knowledgeable, helpful, or unbiased, necessitating an assessment of their credibility. Here, we present a Bayesian model of credibility where the audience simultaneously infers the expertise and intention of the source while trying to discern the truth. A key prediction is that rational inferences about a source’s credibility requires anchoring it on some kernel of shared knowledge. We formalize a scenario where both parties have noisy access to the ground truth of certain topics (e.g., is broccoli healthy?), which permits consensus. Credibility is then quantified by examining how the audience responds to testimony on new topics, about which only the source has information (e.g., is avocado healthy?). We plan to apply this general computational framework in domains like science communication and media consumption.

**Authors:**

Peiyao Hu: Stevens Institute of Technology; Mark K Ho: Stevens Institute of Technology

Common sense reasoning about credibility

The precise mechanisms precipitating the process of representational change in problem solving have been investigated for nearly a century. One current hypothesis is that analyzing the unchanging elements of previous attempts may facilitate restructuring. We investigated this hypothesis by providing solvers with three common examples of unsuccessful problem attempts, their own problem attempts, or no previous attempts. The prior attempts conditions eliminated the need to rely on working memory to access previous unsuccessful attempts. While there was no evidence for an overall effect of the prior attempts conditions, cognitive reflection was identified as a reliable predictor of restructuring and solving. Eye-tracking data were collected to further investigate the contributions of these systems to fixations while solving. The current study is an exploratory analysis of this data, with analyses focusing on participants’ fixations on problem-irrelevant space and unsuccessful attempts.

**Authors:**

Emily Creel: Mississippi State University; Jarrod Moss: Mississippi State University

Exploring the Predictive Power of Eye Movements on Insight Problem Solving

Psychologists have noted that analogical reasoning is pervasive in argumentation (Kuhn, 1992; Holyoak, 1997), but the forms these arguments can take varies substantially. Memes are one common format or argument-by-analogy. Memes are widely recognized images or templates that compares two situations to each other for the purpose of making some (often questionable) point. Even though memes-as-arguments are readily visible on social media, the persuasiveness of this category of argument-by-analogy---and specifically the features that predict their persuasiveness---have not been established. This study investigates whether and in what ways arguments by analogy, delivered in the form of a meme, are persuasive. We develop a large set of memes representing common meme structures, political leaning, and familiarity and examined how these factors predict a meme's perceived clarity, persuasiveness, and memorability, along with these memes effects on beliefs about issues such as climate change, immigration, and racism.

**Authors:**

Zachary Horne: University of Edinburgh; Leonidas A. A. Doumas: University of Edinburgh; Katherine Hallin: University of Edinburgh

Testing the persuasiveness of meme based arguments by analogy

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is commonly used to assess executive (dys-)function, particularly in neuropsychological patients. Performance on the test typically yields two types of error: perseverative errors, where participants persist in applying an inferred rule despite negative feedback, and set-loss errors, were participants cease applying an inferred rule despite positive feedback. The two types of error are known to dissociate. In this paper we apply an existing model of the WCST (the model of Bishara et al., 2010) to a novel dataset, focussing specifically on the distribution of the two types of error over the duration of the task. Using Maximum Likelihood Estimation to fit the model to the data, we argue that the model provides a good account of the performance of some participants, but a poor account of individual differences. It is argued that this is because the model is essentially a competence model which fails to incorporate performance factors, and that accounting for the different types of error, and in particular the error distribution during the task, requires incorporating performance factors into the model. Some consequences of this for the broader enterprise of developing normative competence models are discussed.

**Authors:**

Richard P Cooper: Birkbeck, University of London

Error in Sequential Action: An Evaluation of a Competence Model

Humans are highly sensitive to minimal cues of resource transfer. The mere displacement of an object next to a motionless animate suffices to bind the agent causing the transfer (giver) and its recipient in an interactive unit. In the present study, we investigated whether such binding occurs also when the transfer represents a side effect of the agent’s pursuit of another goal. Using a change-detection and EEG paradigm, we found that adults exhibited behavioral (inhibition of role-change sensitivity) and electrophysiological (suppression of alpha-band oscillations) signatures of social binding for actions causing the collateral transfer of a resource relative to actions that did not. No binding was observed when the agent caused a collateral loss of someone’s possession, showing that collateral gains and losses are not treated as equal cues of affectedness. These findings suggest that adults interpret actions producing giving-like outcomes, even if indirectly, as diagnostic of social interactions.

**Authors:**

Jun Yin: Ningbo University; Qingqing Ye: Ningbo University; Denis Tatone: Central European University

Premium content

Downloads

Next from CogSci 2024

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

Similar lecture

COHESENTIA: A Novel Benchmark of Incremental versus Holistic Assessment of Coherence in Generated Texts

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES