Netherlands

In the context of online education, the impact of a speaker&#39;s gestures on children&#39;s spatial performance during learning still needs more exploration. Previous work found that spatial directions presented with gestures enhance children&#39;s performance on physical visuospatial arrays (Austin &amp; Sweller, 2014). Here, we investigate whether spatial directions with or without gestures relate differently to 5-year-old monolingual Turkish children&#39;s spatial performance on a computerized map task. Children engaged in a task on a tablet that required them to recall the route directions presented in the videos either multimodally (speech-gestures combined) or in speech alone. Responses were coded for the target information in the route descriptions for actions (running), locations (school), and spatial directions (behind). Results only revealed better performance for encoding spatial directions presented multimodally (p=.013). Summarizing, the results emphasize the importance of multimodal input in enhancing children&#39;s spatial performance and highlight gestures&#39; role in virtual visual-spatial learning environments.

**Authors:**

Elif Orakçı: Istanbul University; Dilay Z. Karadoller: Middle East Technical University (METU)

CogSci 2024

Multimodality on screen: Multimodal spatial directions enhance children&#39;s spatial performance on virtual visual-spatial maps

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

In the context of online education, the impact of a speaker's gestures on children's spatial performance during learning still needs more exploration. Previous work found that spatial directions presented with gestures enhance children's performance on physical visuospatial arrays (Austin & Sweller, 2014). Here, we investigate whether spatial directions with or without gestures relate differently to 5-year-old monolingual Turkish children's spatial performance on a computerized map task. Children engaged in a task on a tablet that required them to recall the route directions presented in the videos either multimodally (speech-gestures combined) or in speech alone. Responses were coded for the target information in the route descriptions for actions (running), locations (school), and spatial directions (behind). Results only revealed better performance for encoding spatial directions presented multimodally (p=.013). Summarizing, the results emphasize the importance of multimodal input in enhancing children's spatial performance and highlight gestures' role in virtual visual-spatial learning environments.

**Authors:**

Elif Orakçı: Istanbul University; Dilay Z. Karadoller: Middle East Technical University (METU)

Multimodality on screen: Multimodal spatial directions enhance children's spatial performance on virtual visual-spatial maps

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.

Many college students drop out of STEM majors after struggling in gateway courses, in part because these courses place large demands on students’ time. The risk of attrition is higher for students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds who often work to pay for college, making such time commitments unfeasible. In two laboratory experiments with different topics (central tendency and linear regression), we identified a promising approach to increase the efficiency of STEM instruction. When we removed lectures and taught participants exclusively with practice and feedback, they learned 2-3 times faster. However, our research also showed that this instructional strategy has the potential to undermine interest in course content for less-confident students, who may be discouraged when challenged to solve problems without upfront instruction and learn from their mistakes. If researchers and educators can develop engaging and efficacy-building activities that replace lectures, STEM courses could become better, more equitable learning environments.

**Authors:**

Michael W Asher: Carnegie Mellon University; Faria Sana: Athabasca University; Kenneth R Koedinger: Carnegie Mellon University; Paulo Carvalho: Human Computer Interaction Institute

Students Can Learn More Efficiently When Lectures Are Replaced with Practice Opportunities and Feedback

Many learning scenarios involve free practice where learners have the freedom to initiate and stop practice whenever they want (e.g., hobbies and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)). However a major concern in free practice learning are high dropout rates. Inspired by the literature on learning and forgetting curves and motivation-achievement cycles, we propose the Reciprocal-Practice-Success (RPS) model of learning ‘in the wild’. Through simulations, we show how the long term learning outcome is sensitive to the shape of the learning curve. We also provide a dynamical systems approximation for the RPS model showing similar qualitative behaviour. Through a bifurcation analysis of two controllable learning parameters - minimum practice rate and success sensitivity, we show what interventions can work to prevent quitting. Finally, we describe robustness and possible extensions to our basic model which will be necessary to adapt it to specific learning contexts.

**Authors:**

Pritam Laskar: University of Amsterdam; Han L. J. van der Maas: University of Amsterdam

A Reciprocal-Practice-Success (RPS) Model of Free Practice

There is no consensus in the literature about the role of disfluencies as cues to deception. The current study used an interactive picture-description game to collect speech data of speakers and veracity assessments of listeners engaged in a socially meaningful interaction. The paradigm was implemented so that not only statement veracity (i.e., true or false) could be analysed, but also speaker intention (i.e., wanting or not wanting to be believed) and listener decision (i.e., believing or not believing the speaker). The goal was to test whether veracity, intention, and decision could be predicted based on disfluency patterns, using Multivariate Pattern Analysis. We observed that veracity and intention could not be predicted above chance on the basis of disfluency features, while listeners based their decision on these patterns. These results suggest that listeners wrongly interpret disfluencies as cues to deception.

**Authors:**

Aurélie Pistono: Ghent University; Bram De keersmaecker: Ghent University; Robert Hartsuiker: Ghent University

Deceptive deception: disfluencies are incorrectly interpreted as cues to deceptive speech

Language represents a framework used to organize the things we experience. Redundant linguistic category labels facilitate category learning at a faster rate than category learning without labels (Luypan et al., 2007) suggesting language is also meaningfully involved in forming new categories. However, labels are not exclusively advantageous. Brojde et al., (2011) demonstrates that labels can be detrimental to category learning dependent on attending to historically agnostic dimensions over historically diagnostic ones (i.e., learning texture-based categories while ignoring shape). To separate historical experience from novel category learning, we task participants with classifying stimuli based on perceptual dimensions with less historical precedence as diagnostic cues for categorizing objects in everyday life (i.e., orientation and spatial frequency). Our results reveal a labeling advantage as well as slower overall learning in the orientation condition compared to spatial frequency-based learning. We discuss implications involving the historical use of these dimensions and the relationship between diagnostic and non-diagnostic dimensions.

**Authors:**

Andrew J Mertens: University of Colorado at Boulder; Eliana Colunga: University of Colorado Boulder

Labels aid in the more difficult of two category learning tasks: Implications for the relative diagnosticity of perceptual dimensions in selective attention tasks

Language learners not only acquire novel words but also enhance their lexical knowledge by assimilating additional meanings to words already known. Studies on native speakers indicate that acquiring new meanings for known words temporarily hinders access to their original meanings, a phenomenon known as the perturbation effect, which in turn predicts long-term learning outcomes. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether comparable mechanisms operate in L2 acquisition. In this study, Chinese-English bilinguals learned new meanings for L2 words. We assessed the processing of both new and original meanings at three intervals: Days 1, 2, and 8. In contrast to findings in native speakers, learning new meanings actually facilitated, rather than impeded, access to the original meanings. Discrepancies in the patterns of L1 and L2 learning imply that the quality of lexical representations could modulate the perturbation effect.

**Authors:**

Yufan Zhang: Beijing Language and Culture University; Charles Perfetti: University of Pittsburgh; Xiaoping Fang: Beijing Language and Culture University

New-meaning learning of L2 words facilitates the access to original meanings

Error-based learning may depend on having cognitive resources available to detect and correct the error. This study manipulated the order in which individuals encountered pairings that violated their initial expectations in a 2x2 cross-situational word learning. Individuals learned words that violated their expectations better when they occurred after an accurate pairing than when they occurred before an accurate pairing. When individuals have accurate knowledge about the referent corresponding to the word that occurs first, they can use this to bootstrap their learning of the second word, even when it violates their expectations. However, when the information that violates their expectations occurs first, learners are unable to determine the referent of that word during the first labelling event of the trial. The increased referential ambiguity within trials where the errors occur first, coupled with competing demands at the time of error correction may interfere with learning word-referent pairs that violate expectations.

**Authors:**

Katherine D Snelling: Queen's University; Stanka A. Fitneva: Queen's University

Context Affects Error Correction During Cross-Situational Word Learning

How are morphemes recognized and interpreted during incremental sentence comprehension? We investigated this question in a crossmodal primed lexical decision task employing words that contain semantically ambiguous roots (e.g., ‘bark’; with meanings related to both “dog” and “tree”) but which are disambiguated when affixed by “-ing” (e.g., ‘barking’; related to “dog” only). We aimed to understand whether access to the meaning of the root ‘bark’ would be constrained by lower-level morphological affixation. In our experiment, participants listened to sentences containing an affixed ambiguous root while concurrently performing lexical decisions to a visual target related to the root-only meaning, the affixed meaning, or matched controls. Targets were presented for 80 ms at the recognition point of bark or 500 ms post-recognition. We found that both meanings of the root were activated, despite affixation. Results suggest that a parsing system blind to semantics decomposes morphologically complex words into morphemes before recognition.

**Authors:**

Cedric Le Bouar: Concordia University; Roberto G. de Almeida: Concordia University

Accessing the meanings of ambiguous word roots in context: Evidence from crossmodal priming

Computational reinforcement learning models suggest that learning involves both model-free (MF) and model-based (MB) learning, observed in instrumental (Daw et al., 2011) and Pavlovian (Schad et al., 2020) behaviors. Pavlovian values impact instrumental responses during Pavlovian-instrumental transfer (PIT). Single-lever PIT paradigms, often considered as MF, show correlations with reduced MB instrumental control (Garbusow et al., 2014; Review Cartoni et al., 2016; Sebold et al., 2016). To explore whether single-lever PIT effects are exclusively MF or also MB, we created a novel two-stage paradigm assessing MF and MB control trial by trial. Computational dual-control model simulations predicted a two-way interaction for MF PIT and a three-way interaction for MB PIT. Thus far, Bayesian sequential analysis using Savage-Dickey density ratios (N=22) suggests the existence of MF (BF=3.94) and MB (BF=1.26) influences on PIT, emphasizing the role of MB computations in single-lever PIT tasks.

**Authors:**

Laura Alexandra Wirth: Universität Potsdam; Daniel J. Schad: University of Potsdam

Assessing model-based and model-free Pavlovian-instrumental transfer using a novel two-stage paradigm

In two experiments, we experimentally manipulated people's subjective opinions about new wellness trends using positive clips from publicly available YouTube videos. Participants spontaneously judged novel statements that were consistent with their new opinion to be factual, despite the fact that they had encountered no evidence for any of the statements. Opinion change drove belief change, contradictory to the common assumption that facts determine opinions. Positive opinions also biased participants' curiosity such that they were highly motivated to learn more about opinion-congruent statements. In Study 2, participants reported false memories for the opinion-congruent statements within the video. These results illustrate the primary role of subjective opinions in belief formation about objective truths, and suggest that the eradication of misinformation is an incomplete solution for societal disagreements.

**Authors:**

Evan Orticio: University of California, Berkeley; Celeste Kidd: University of California, Berkeley

Shifting your opinion makes you change your factual beliefs without evidence

Observational learning has been studied using the serial reaction time task (SRTT) reporting inconsistent findings on its nature. When present, observational learning appears to be due to explicit learning, even for complex second-order sequences (SOC). In contrast, statistical learning has been studied using the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) reporting implicit observational learning of simple sequences. We combined elements of the SRTT and RSVP to investigate whether observational learning of SOC can occur. Two groups were exposed to either a repeated or a random sequence in RSVP. A completion and a recognition tasks were performed as a measure of explicit learning, and an SRTT as a measure of implicit learning. Although results showed no difference between groups in the SRTT, the early learning index predicted the recovery from interference exclusively in the experimental group, which also showed a greater awareness of the repetitiveness of the sequence.

**Authors:**

Mark G. Orr: Institute for Human and Machine Cognition; Christian Lebiere: Carnegie Mellong University; Peter Pirolli: Institute for human and machine cognition; Don Morrison: Carnegie Mellon University

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