United States

In two novel verb experiments using the visual fixation paradigm, we investigated how Mandarin-learning toddlers employ distributional cues and semantic cues to categorize novel unaccusative and unergative verbs. In Experiment 1, 31-month-old (but not 19-month-old) participants were found to use the word-order cue to categorize two novel verbs VUA and VUE: after hearing “VUA-le NP” and “NP VUE-le” in the training phase, they categorized VUA as unaccusative and VUE as unergative, showing discrimination in looking times between grammatical trials “NP VUA-le” and ungrammatical trials “VUE-le NP” in the test phase. In Experiment 2, 31-month-olds used the semantic cue of telicity provided via novel events to make categorizations: watching a telic event paired with “VUA-le” and an atelic event paired with “VUE-le” led to differentiation between grammatical trials “VUA-le NP” and ungrammatical trials “VUE-le NP”. The findings provide evidence for toddlers’ ability to extract information from the input and make generalizations in verb learning.

CogSci 2025

Learning novel intransitive verbs from input cues: Experiments with Mandarin-learning toddlers

learning

eye tracking

language acquisition

linguistics

syntax

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

### 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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#### Code of Conduct

By attending the CogSci 2025 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s **[Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ChPuihLy6jE_BWqfO7J2KKgX35JW2zsM/view?usp=sharing)**.
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The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Can we derive computational metrics to quantify visual creativity in drawings across intelligent agents, while accounting for inherent differences in technical skill and style? To answer this, we curate a novel dataset consisting of 1338 drawings by children, adults and AI on a popular creative drawing task. We characterize two aspects of the drawings—(1) style and (2) content. For style, we define measures based on ink density, ink distribution and number of elements. For content, we use expert-annotated categories to study conceptual diversity, and image and text embeddings to compute distance measures. We find significant differences in style and content in the groups—children’s drawings had more components, AI drawings had greater ink density, and adult drawings were conceptually diverse. We also highlight a misalignment between creativity judgments obtained through expert and automated ratings. Our work provides a novel framework for studying human and artificial creativity beyond the textual modality.

Pencils to Pixels: A Systematic Study of Creative Drawings across Children, Adults and AI

In the Gricean tradition, pragmatic competence is part of the general human capacity for social reasoning. Indeed, human performance in reference games involving ad-hoc implicatures sometimes aligns with idealized models of rational interaction. But such experiments have also found that humans derive far fewer implicatures than ideal models, subject to individual differences unrelated to social reasoning. In this paper, we consider whether these patterns could arise from the resource-rational deployment of a core social competence, such that individuals choose from various strategies of interpretation, given those strategies’ resource demands and success rates, subject to individually-varying predispositions and exploration tendencies. We construct a model of this resource- rational performance in the cognitive architecture ACT-R—to our knowledge the first mechanistic model of performance in these tasks—and we examine its predictions for multi-trial reference games across two model experiments. The model reproduces the key patterns in the human data, providing an initial proof of concept for the role of resource-rationality in these tasks and opening a new avenue for understanding individual differences in pragmatic reasoning.

An ACT-R model of resource-rational performance in a pragmatic reference game

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by cognitive biases that impair emotional information processing. This study examines how acute social stress affects working memory (WM) updating in socially anxious individuals using an emotional 2-back task. A 2×2 factorial design (N = 137) categorized participants into socially anxious (SA) and non-anxious (NSA) groups, further divided into stressed and control conditions. Acute stress was induced via speech anticipation, and subjective stress ratings were recorded. Mixed-
effects modelling revealed independent negative effects of both social anxiety and acute stress on WM updating, including reduced accuracy, increased false alarms, lower discriminability (d-prime), and increased inverse efficiency score. Notably, disgusted facial expressions enhanced task efficiency under stress. Findings suggest stress-related cognitive deficits in social anxiety are additive rather than interactive, highlighting potential
targets for intervention. This study contributes to understanding emotion-cognition interactions and extends research to understudied cultural contexts.

The Impact of Acute Social Stress on Working Memory Updating in Social Anxiety Disorder

The addition of verbal narration could impede reading performance, called the verbal redundancy effect. Two experiments in this study explored the moderating role of readers’ vocabulary size and text difficulty in this effect. A total of 77 native English speakers in Experiment 1 and 45 non-native English speakers in Experiment 2 were divided into two groups of vocabulary-size in each experiment. In both experiments, participants read eight passages and answered questions. The study manipulated the narration presentation and text difficulty. Experiment 1 showed that adding narration impedes comprehension when high-vocabulary participants read easy passages, whereas it enhances comprehension when low-vocabulary participants read easy passages. The redundant narration effect was moderated by reading skills. Experiment 2 showed no significant narration effect, but comprehension scores were higher when high-vocabulary multilinguals read neutral passages with narration than without narration. These effects are aligned with previous research and well explained by cognitive load theory.

Assessing the Verbal Redundancy Effect by Adding Narration to Written Text  in Native and Non-Native Speakers

Children’s emotional development is linked to language
development for typically developing children and deaf
children with native sign language exposure. However,
approximately 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents
who are not familiar with sign language. These deaf children
begin learning a sign language when they attend a school for
the deaf. Late sign language exposure has negative
consequences on several aspects of language development. We
investigate whether acquiring sign language late affects
children's emotion recall and channel of emotion expression.
After watching a silent video depicting emotions, late- and
native-signing deaf children retold the story in Turkish Sign
Language. Results showed that late signers recalled fewer
emotions and used fewer signs and facial expressions compared
to native signers. Manual gestures (non-sign hand movements),
head and body movements did not differ across groups. The
findings suggest that late sign language acquisition negatively
impacts deaf children’s ability to recall and express emotions,
highlighting the importance of early language exposure for the
development of emotion recall.

The Effects of Late Sign Language Acquisition on Emotion Recall and Expression in Deaf Children

Information disseminated through mass-media has been known to significantly influence behaviors such as voting (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987), brand preferences (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981), and public opinion (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). More specifically, the way information is framed and presented in mass media (for instance through “breaking news” and “sensational headlines”) can reinforce existing beliefs and contribute to political and ideological polarization, with partisan media creating "echo chambers" that deepen biases (Hobolt et al., 2024). The current study leverages these insights to investigate the effects of the echo-chambered media and the time available for information consumption in an intergroup context across three experiments. Going by the minimal group paradigm, Experiment 1 employed a randomized, untimed presentation (non-echo-chamber) of news about an ingroup and an outgroup, while Experiment 2 used a blocked, untimed design (echo-chamber), and Experiment 3 a blocked, timed design (echo-chamber, doomscroll). All experiments involved two news sources with varying reliability (low and high) disseminating valanced (positive/negative) intergroup news headlines, and the participants were asked about the degree to which they believed the specific news items. Results showed that the manner of news presentation and timing moderated ingroup favoritism, with higher propensity to believe positive ingroup than positive outgroup news and vice-versa for the negative news, with the most significant bias emerging in Experiment 2 and negative news bias in Experiment 3. These findings shed light on how patterns of media consumption may influence intergroup perceptions and lead to polarization in society.

Scroll-Time and Echo-Chambers: Effect of Mass Media on Ingroup Bias and Polarization

Why do certain past events resurface more often in our thoughts?  This study investigates the factors influencing retrospective mind wandering, particularly concerning incomplete or unresolved experiences. We used a custom-designed game in which in-game events were systematically varied, then assessed participants’ spontaneous recall of those events one week later.  Results revealed that offline participants and those familiar with the experimenter were likelier to experience game-related mind-wandering. The strongest predictor of recall was the time spent engaged with the game, highlighting the importance of memory encoding strength. While individual rumination tendencies did not predict whether participants would recall the game, they did predict the frequency of such episodes among those who did. Thoughts centered on the game’s protagonist over peripheral details, suggesting narrative salience.  Based on these insights, we propose an initiation maintenance model of retrospective mind wandering, which integrates bottom-up and top-down processes to generate and persist spontaneous thoughts.

Testing the Zeigarnik effect in spontaneous memory recall during mind-wandering

We investigated selective attention towards high- versus low-calorie foods in individuals with normal (BMI 18–25) and high BMI (>25) using eye-tracking. Participants performed a central letter discrimination task while irrelevant food images appeared peripherally (5° from fixation). We measured the probability and latency of first fixations. High BMI participants were more likely to initially fixate on high-calorie processed foods. On the contrary, the normal BMI group showed a bias towards low-calorie foods, although this observation needs further investigation. These attentional biases occurred despite controlling for perceptual differences between images. The high BMI group showed a bias in the left visual field, as predicted by the literature on dominance of the right hemisphere in rewarding stimulus processing. This early, automatic attentional bias may contribute to unhealthy eating patterns and has implications for understanding cognitive mechanisms involved in obesity, particularly the role of bottom-up attentional capture by rewarding food stimuli.

Gaze and Gluttony: How BMI Affects Our First Fixations

Although the MINERVA 2 model provides a detailed account of many findings related to episodic memory, its assumption that primary (working) memory is a single vector of features is unrealistic because it fails to explain the feature-binding problem—how the features of multiple items or objects can be simultaneously maintained but still differentiated. For example, the model cannot explain how the features of “red circle” and “blue square” would be maintained in primary memory in a manner that allows the color features to be correctly associated with their respective shapes. Here we propose a more plausible, biologically inspired implementation of primary memory within MINERVA 2, evaluating its performance using serial-order memory tasks and contextualizing the model’s new assumptions within the broader cognitive science and neuroscience literatures.

Oscillating Echoes: Primary Memory in MINERVA 2

Researchers in cognitive development and cognitive science have engaged in long-standing debates concerning nativist versus empiricist perspectives on the origins of knowledge, the existence and nature of representations, and the importance of embodiment. Recognizing the enormous scope of these questions, I will concentrate on three illustrations: the geometric module debate, the cognitive map debate, and the development of mental rotation. In doing so, I will highlight the importance of charting individual variation as well as modal development, using an evolutionary perspective and cross-species data, and taking an emergentist experience-expectant and experience-dependent approach to development and to adult cognition. 

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Next from CogSci 2025

Pencils to Pixels: A Systematic Study of Creative Drawings across Children, Adults and AI

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Predicting Multilingual and Cross-Lingual (Graded) Lexical Entailment

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