Netherlands

Current literature suggests young children are poor innovators. However, this research has only assessed children’s capacity to create a novel solution, rather than to recognise when an existing solution has ongoing utility. We examined children’s capacity to retain and share a solution that would be useful again in the future. Across two rooms, 4- to 9-year-olds (N=83) were given a series of time-based tasks which could be solved by building and using a tool. When given the opportunity to transport a tool between the first and second rooms, only the 6- to 7-year-olds and 8- to 9-year-olds retained the tool that would be useful again above chance levels. When subsequently asked to secure a solution for another child, only 8- to 9-year-olds chose this tool above chance. Positive age-partialled correlations between children’s retaining and sharing behaviours suggest that these behaviours may reflect a common underlying capacity for recognising future utility.

**Authors:**

Zoe Ockerby: The University of Queensland; Thomas Suddendorf: University of Queensland; Jonathan Redshaw: University of Queensland

CogSci 2024

Recognising the future utility of a solution: When do children choose to retain and share an object to solve a future problem?

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**
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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** 
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.

poster

Very few if any studies address concept combination from a developmental perspective. Here we report a study of how concepts of integer number combine with those of mindreading. We used tasks that require explicit thought and verbal responses, and examined children between 6-10 years of age. We designed four experiments to look at the intersection of quantification and mindreading in development using two combination tasks: (i) visual perspective taking and number; (ii) false belief and number. In both, children needed to coordinate between simple mathematical operations (counting and addition), and reconstructing an agent's visual or mental perspective. Although all senior kindergarteners were proficient in counting, and the majority of them passed the false-belief task, the false belief and number task has proven surprisingly difficult, and was not mastered before age 8. We offer a performance-based explanation of this difficulty.

**Authors:**

Zoltan Jakab: Eötvös Loránd University; Szabolcs Kiss: University of Pécs

Number In Perspective: Why is it Hard for Preschoolers to Attribute False Belief About Numerosity?

Podcasts are unique unimodal modality because they include features like conversation, description, and sound effects to encourage audio engagement. Research shows that learners benefit from learning in two modalities (audio + visual) when information is complementary, not redundant. However, these studies use audio narration of text as auditory stimuli which differs from a podcast format. Do children learn from podcasts, and does providing supporting visual information affect their learning? Children listened (or listened and viewed related images) to an 11-minute science podcast and answered recall and transfer questions. There is no effect of modality on children’s learning, and children in both conditions perform above chance on transfer questions. Using a semantic textual similarity analysis, we show that children in the audiovisual condition do not incorporate visual information in their description of concepts. These results highlight the uniqueness of podcasts as a unimodal context that could benefit higher-order concept learning.

**Authors:**

Emily M Neer: University of California, Los Angeles; Raymond Shao: University of California, Los Angeles; Catherine Sandhofer: University of California, Los Angeles

The Effect of Modality on Children’s Higher-Order Concept Learning

The emergence of deliberate ignorance, i.e. what influences children’s deliberate decisions not to seek information, is a phenomenon so far notably overlooked. This project addresses this gap by investigating various factors that systematically modulate such decisions in children and adults. Across five studies, we presented participants with short stories illustrating social situations where a misdeed occurs, and measured participants’ preference for knowing the identity of the wrongdoer.
Studies 1-3 (N = 549) shows that both children and adults systematically manifest a preference for ignorance when the information value is low, and when the potential wrongdoer is suspected to be a friend. Studies 4-5 (N = 300, data collection in March) further investigate the role of information probability in this phenomenon.
This first contribution shows that children’s preference for deliberate ignorance is modulated by information value and the relationship frame proposed, suggesting a rational approach to ignorance.

**Authors:**

Francesca Bonalumi: Central European University; Ralph Hertwig: Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Azzurra Ruggeri: Technical University Munich

Investigating deliberate ignorance in children and adults

Attachment is crucial for infants' cognitive development and social relationships. Traditional attachment research has been qualitative, lacking a model to explain how infants' attachment styles develop from experience and how these are influenced by personal traits and environmental factors. We propose such a model, predicting how infants balance interaction with caregivers against exploring their surroundings. Our study is based in a grid-world environment containing an infant and caregiver agent. We vary the infant’s preferences and likelihood of moving between emotional states, environmental features such hazards and rewards, and caregiver behavior, making positive or negative interactions more likely. We find that similar types of behavior can arise from a wide range of simulation settings, and that both infant and environmental factors play a role. Our findings suggest that the characteristic exploratory behavior of each attachment style in real infants may arise from a diverse range of conditions.

**Authors:**

Xi Jia Zhou: Stanford Graduate School of Education; Chris Doyle: Stanford University; Michael C. Frank: Stanford University; Nick Haber: Stanford

Simulating Infants’ Attachment: Behavioral Patterns of Caregiver Proximity Seeking and Environment Exploration Using Reinforcement Learning Models.

To behave efficiently, individuals must decide when to exert cognitive effort by weighing its benefits and costs. While adults often make such economical choices, less is known about how these decisions develop. Here, we examined how children and adolescents (N=150, 10-20 years) learn about the value of cognitive effort during a task-switching experiment manipulating the reward benefits (higher vs. lower incentives) and difficulty costs (easy vs. hard conditions) of engaging cognitive effort. Mixed-effects modeling analyses probing the influences of age, learning over time, and the reward and difficulty manipulations on task-switching performance revealed that accuracy improved significantly more rapidly for higher than lower incentives with increasing age, especially during the beginning and middle of learning. Meanwhile, accuracy improved marginally more rapidly for the easy than hard condition with increasing age. Together, these results suggest that reward and difficulty information distinctly guide cognitive effort across time and age.

**Authors:**

Camille V Phaneuf: Harvard University; Isabelle M Jacques: Harvard University; Catherine Insel: Columbia University; Catherine Insel: Northwestern University; A. Ross Otto: McGill University; Leah Somerville PhD: Harvard University; Leah Somerville PhD: Harvard University

Characterizing Age-Related Change in Learning the Value of Cognitive Effort

Young children, like adults, conform to group consensus. However, it is unclear when children develop more sophisticated intuitions about how the composition of groups, the way in which they acquire and aggregate information, impacts advice quality. This experiment assessed children’s developing sensitivity to source independence - that is, do they understand that statistically independent sources of information are more valuable than correlated ones? Children (5-to-11-year-olds, N=106) and teenagers and adults (N=99) played a space exploration game in which they made multiple 2AFC decisions based on the advice of 8 friendly aliens. Across trials and participants, we manipulated consensus (the relative number of advisers endorsing each option) and source diversity (the relative number of independent advisers endorsing each option). 
Results indicated that children were able to detect the correlations between sources, but their ability to exploit this knowledge was late emerging, likely in the early adolescence years.

**Authors:**

Oana Stanciu: Central European University; Azzurra Ruggeri: Technical University Munich

Can children leverage consensus and source independence to get better advice?

The decision to explore a novel option or exploit a known one — referred to as the explore-exploit trade-off — has received much attention from diverse fields of research, ranging from computer science to developmental psychology. However, much of the work on this topic has focused exclusively on an individual agent acting alone, a scenario that does not fully capture the rich social dynamics of human decision-making. In particular, the presence and participation of others can theoretically influence the decision to explore or exploit. One factor which may affect how individuals navigate the explore-exploit tradeoff is the presence of caregivers, who can help buffer the downside costs of more exploratory decision making. Across two pre-registered studies, we investigated whether children and adults predicted more or less exploratory behavior in the presence of a caregiver. In Study 1, we presented U.S. American children (N=87, ages 4 to 8) with vignettes of other children faced with the choice of exploring a novel option or exploiting a known one across a range of domains. In the vignettes, the characters either faced these decisions alone or in the presence of a parent. In Study 2, we presented the same vignettes to U.S. American adults (N=79). Across both studies, and as predicted, we found that both children and adults believed others would be more exploratory in the presence of caregivers. These results add important nuance to our understanding of how individuals navigate the explore-exploit tradeoff, and highlight the role of the social context in shaping these decisions. We aim to build on these results on future work centralizing the role and function of care in decision-making and exploration.

**Authors:**

Annya Dahmani: University of California, Berkeley; Dorsa Amir: University of California, Berkeley; Ashley J Thomas: Harvard University; Alison Gopnik: University of California at Berkeley

Caregiver presence promotes judgements of exploration

The counterfactual emotions of regret and relief arise from considering how the present would look had one taken an alternative past action. We investigated if 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 192) could identify others’ regret and relief by watching videos of actors choosing between two boxes that concealed a better or worse prize. Each actor first looked inside the chosen box and made a happy or sad facial expression, and children were then shown the contents of that box. Critically, the actor then looked inside the non-chosen box and made either a happy or sad facial expression, and children were asked what they thought was inside. Children aged 6 years and older were able to identify that the non-chosen box concealed a better prize when the actor was sad, and a worse prize when the actor was happy. The abilities to experience and recognise counterfactual emotions may develop concurrently.

**Authors:**

Alicia K Jones: The University of Queensland; Nicole Nelson: University of Adelaide; Shalini Gautam: Boston College; Jonathan Redshaw: University of Queensland

Young children recognise when others experience regret and relief

The use of controlled processes to resolve cognitive conflict can have various effects on performance in memory tasks. There are two hypotheses in this regard. On one hand, the use of controlled processes required to resolve cognitive conflict may impair a deep stimulus encoding, and consequently its recall. Otherwise, it would favour the encoding and subsequent memory of the stimuli involved in it. The objective of the study is both to investigate conflict effects (i.e., stimulus and response level conflict) on memory performance and the role of encoding level in modulating that effect using different paradigms (e.g., the flanker, and task switching paradigm). The preliminary results show that conflict effects seem to be independent by the level of stimulus processing. Therefore, task-switching paradigm seems to nullify both stimulus and response-level conflict effects on memory performance. Otherwise, Flanker paradigm seems to be useful to highlight conflict effects on memory.

**Authors:**

Nicolò Ciarrocchi: Sapienza; Pierpaolo Zivi: Sapienza University of Rome

CognitiveConflict_0131

This study investigates social context’s effect on human perceptual decision-making in animacy recognition, essential for identifying living entities like predators or mates. Visual cues, especially goal-directed motion, are key for animacy inference. We hypothesize a bias (reflected by response frequency and speed) towards identifying motion as goal-directed in the presence of others. We also explore if this context enhances accuracy in recognizing genuine goal-directed motion. Participants evaluate animations with varying degrees of goal-directedness, alone and with another individual independently performing the same task. The animations feature either a blue disk seemingly chasing a red disk, across four gradations of chasing intensity, or the disks moving randomly. After each animation, participants indicate via button press whether the blue disk appeared to chase the red disk. Through Signal Detection Theory and Drift Diffusion Models, we aim to elucidate social presence's effect on animacy perception, shedding light on social factors in perceptual decision-making.

**Authors:**

Rebecca Geiselmann: LMU Munich; Ophelia Deroy: LMU; Lasana Harris: UCL

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