Netherlands

The scientific potential of digital game studies in psychology is limited by the observational nature of the data that they investigate. However, digital environments present us with a perfect opportunity to incorporate experimental paradigms in complex interactive and multivariate worlds where each decision made by participants can be tracked and recorded. In this study, we demonstrate an industry-academic research collaboration that offers a proof-of-the-concept on how minor modifications of the game settings could be used to test psychological research questions. We modify the settings of the Zool platform game, where players allocated to the experimental group are provided with more information when in danger of dying in the game. Results of the study show that manipulation does not influence behaviour in the game, such as achieved score or number of deaths, but it changes the overall motivation of whether players will continue playing the game after the disappointing event of losing all their lives, game-over event.

**Authors:**

Nemanja Vaci: University of Sheffield; Tom Stafford: University of Sheffield; Ying Ren: University of Sheffield; Jacob Habgood: SUMO Digital

CogSci 2024

Experiments in games: modding the Zool Redimensioned warning system to support players’ skill acquisition and attrition rate

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

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.

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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.

Intellectual Humility (IH) is the ability to understand the limits of one’s knowledge. It is important to maximize the benefits and mitigate the threats of IH. We explored the impact of perspective taking (PT) on IH and its connection to confirmation bias (CB). In a mixed pretest-posttest experiment with 174 participants randomly assigned to self- or other-perspective, IH was higher in the other-perspective (vs self-perspective). Also, exposure to other-perspective boosted IH (vs baseline) and exposure to self-perspective inhibited IH (vs baseline). Interestingly, IH was not correlated with CB, challenging the notion that IH is a protective factor against CB. The study illustrates a clear distinction between other- and self-perspective and their impact on IH. Practicing other-perspective, allows to transcend from one’s egocentric views, fostering IH. While self-perspective, reinforces egocentric views, leading to intellectual arrogance. Lastly, both intellectually humble and arrogant are susceptible to CB, emphasizing the need for more research.

**Authors:**

Foivos Kotsogiannis: The American College of Greece, Deree; Ioanna Spentza: The American College of Greece; Chrysanthi Nega: The American College of Greece

The Effects of Perspective Taking on Intellectual Humility and its Relationship to Confirmation Bias

How do people perform general-purpose physical reasoning across a variety of scenarios in everyday life? Across two studies with seven different physical scenarios, we asked participants to predict whether or where two objects will make contact. People achieved high accuracy and were highly consistent with each other in their predictions. We hypothesize that this robust generalization is a consequence of being able to run noisy physics mental simulations. We designed an “intuitive physics engine'' model to capture this generalizable simulation. We find that this model generalized in human-like ways to unseen stimuli and to a different query of predictions. We further evaluated several state-of-the-art deep learning models on the same task and found that they could not explain human predictions as well. This study provides evidence that human's robust generalization in physics predictions are supported by a probabilistic simulation model, and suggests the need for structure in learned dynamics models.

**Authors:**

Haoliang Wang: University of California, San Diego; Khaled Jedoui: Stanford University; Rahul Venkatesh: Stanford University; Felix Jedidja Binder: UC San Diego; Josh Tenenbaum: MIT; Judith E. Fan: Stanford University; Daniel Yamins: Stanford University; Kevin A Smith: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Probabilistic simulation supports generalizable intuitive physics

The relational matching-to-sample task (RMTS) is a gold standard in measuring abstract concepts. Most preschoolers and non-human animals do not spontaneously succeed in the classic, two-item version of the task. It is debated whether this failure indicates a lack of abstract reasoning ability, perhaps linked to limited language capabilities, or rather stems from learned biases for other bases of matching. We developed a physical, causal RMTS task for 4 to 5-year-old children based on matching the weight relations within object pairs by asking them to align two balance scale apparatuses. We presented conflicting object matches in half of the trials and a transfer phase with a new set of stimuli. By age five, children benefitted from the causal context of the task, suggesting that not solely abstract reasoning abilities but other factors, like biases to match individual object features, influence their performance in classic arbitrary RMTS tasks.

**Authors:**

Elisa Felsche: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Luke Maurits: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Daniel Benjamin Moritz Haun: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Can a Causal Relational Matching-to-Sample Task Reveal Abstract Reasoning Abilities in Preschool Children?

Why do beliefs that gender differences are innate (i.e., gender essentialism) sometimes lead to normative judgments about how individual people ought to be? In the current study, we propose that a missing premise linking gender essentialism and normativity rests on the common folk-biological assumption that biological features serve a biological function. When participants (N = 289) learned that a novel feature of the gender category “mothers” was common and innate, they overwhelmingly assumed that it must have served some function across human history. When they learned that it served a historical function, they assumed that it must still be beneficial in today’s environment. When participants learned that the feature was beneficial, they judged that contemporary mothers ought to have it, and they were more willing to intervene to ensure that they would by constraining the choices of individual mothers. Thus, we suggest that essentialist assumptions can shape normative social judgments via the explanations people tend to generate about why certain features of natural kind categories become common to being with. This finding articulates one manifestation of the naturalistic fallacy, with implications for policy debates about bodily autonomy and choice.

**Authors:**

Emily Foster-Hanson: Swarthmore College; Tania Lombrozo: Princeton University

Functional Explanations Link Gender Essentialism and Normativity

This work provides an alternative account for deviations in human causal reasoning from normative predictions based on Causal Bayesian Networks (CBNs). We highlight violations of the Markov condition (Screening Off) and insufficient Explaining Away. Different from other accounts, our model does not assume that people fail to honor normative predictions due to reliance on heuristics, hidden nodes and links or cognitive limitations. Instead, we propose that people are rationally uncertain about the received causal model they are asked to reason with. We fitted the model to published data from two experiments where people were asked to make probability estimates on inferences of interest within a causal model. We find that the model is able to i) reproduce deviations from normative predictions, and ii) predict changes in the magnitude of these deviations across contexts. We conclude that assuming that people, in order to be rational, will always fully believe in the information they receive about a causal model may be too strong an assumption.

**Authors:**

Nicolas Marchant: Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez; Guillermo Puebla: Universidad de Tarapacá; Tadeg Quillien: University of Edinburgh; Sergio E. Chaigneau: Adolfo Ibanez University

Rationally uncertain: investigating deviations from Explaining Away and Screening Off in causal reasoning

In an era in which people are bombarded by claims, often from unreliable sources (e.g., generative AI, click-bait headlines), understanding what leads people to believe such claims is imperative. Building on work demonstrating the role of explanation in learning, we test how the process of explaining a claim affects people’s beliefs in it (3 studies; N=476, 17,580 observations). In Study 1, participants read 30 scientific news headlines. For each, participants either: generated an explanation for the reported phenomenon, wrote down any thoughts they had about it, or retyped it word-for-word. Participants rated the likelihood that the headline was true. In Study 2, participants also provided baseline ratings one week before the manipulation. Study 3 added a control condition where participants simply read the headline. Across studies, participants believed claims of fact were more likely to be true after trying to explain them compared to any control condition.

**Authors:**

Isaac Handley-Miner: Boston College; Liane Young: Boston College

Does the process of explaining affect one's beliefs?

Classic base-rate neglect studies have been consistently criticised for lacking ecological validity. A study by Welsh & Navarro (2012) found this heuristic was significantly reduced when participants perceived the base rate as more relevant. The present study aims to study this phenomenon through a more realistic scenario while simultaneously capturing participants’ written reasoning. Using mixed-methods, participants (N = 2,052) read an engaging scenario regarding a person who committed infidelity and containing a base-rate and specific information where the contextual information regarding the base-rate was manipulated. They were then asked to provide an estimate of the person’s likelihood to cheat in the future. Results show that each of our three manipulations to the context of the base rate are significant in affecting participants’ estimates, supporting Welsh and Navarro’s findings. Analysis of participants’ written reasoning demonstrates the sophistication and nuance of participants’ engagement with the base-rate, challenging the original view of this supposed heuristic.

**Authors:**

Nine Adler: University College London; Stephen H Dewitt: University College London

Re-Examining Base-Rate Neglect: The Effect Of Context

“Episodes” in memory are formed by the experience of dynamic events that unfold over time. However, just because a series of events unfolds sequentially does not mean that its constituents are related. Sequences can have a high degree of causal coherence, each event connecting to the next through a cause-and-effect relationship, or be a fragmented series of unrelated occurrences. Are causally coherent events remembered better? We used dynamic stimuli showing unfamiliar events to test the effect of causal structure on episodic recall in a cued memory task. Experiment 1 found that the order of causally coherent sequences of events is better remembered than that of fragmented events. Experiment 2 showed that recall of causally relevant details of coherent stimuli is superior to recall of details in fragmented sequences. These findings demonstrate that the episodic memory system is sensitive to the causal structure of events and suggest coherence usually improves recall.

**Authors:**

Andreas Arslan: Central European University; Jonathan F. Kominsky: Central European University

Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events

The current research investigates if causal events such as collisions will attract our attention and make us notice other changes that might occur to these colliding objects. Participants were asked to report colour changes in two objects, one involved in a causal event (a collision) and the other independent of any collision. We observed a significant preference towards reporting the colliding colour changing object when colour changes happened during and before the collision, but the preference was less significant when the colour changes happened after the collision. We suggest that the preference stems from participants anticipating causal events and pay extra attention to objects that might involve in a collision. This focused attention makes participants more likely to notice color changes during the anticipation period, which means people are actively devoting more cognitive resources anticipating and confirming causal interactions. This finding suggests that people prioritise causal observations in visual tasks.

**Authors:**

Tianshu Chen: University College London; Christos Bechlivanidis: University College London; Henrik Singmann: UCL; David Lagnado: University College London

The Attraction of Anticipation: How Causal Interactions Draw People’s Attention in Visual Tasks

While narratives have shaped cognition and cultures for centuries, digital media and online social networks have introduced new narrative phenomena. With increased narrative agency, networked groups of individuals can directly contribute and steer narratives that center our collective discussions on politics, science and morality. We report the results of a social network experiment (N = 340; interactions = 6,800) on narrative processing and hashtag production, in which networked groups of participants interpreted a text-based narrative of a disaster event, and were incentivized to produce matching hashtags with their network neighbors. We found that a network's neighborhood structure influences the emergence of dominant beliefs through coordination with network neighbors. Using natural language processing, we showed that networked interaction shifts participants' representations of the narrative's causal information.

**Authors:**

Hunter Priniski: UCLA; Bryce Linford: UCLA; Sai Krishna: University of Southern California; Fred Morstatter: USC Information Sciences Institute; Jeff Brantingham: UCLA; Hongjing Lu: UCLA

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