United States

Adults’ ability to detect online misinformation is improved by cognitive reflection and targeted instruction. Is the same true for children? We explored this question by asking elementary-school-aged children (n = 135) to judge the veracity of news stories, some real and some fake, and comparing their performance to scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test, Developmental version (CRT-D). Participants were also administered a tutorial encouraging them to scrutinize the plausibility of a story’s content or the credibility of its source. Children’s differentiation of fake news from real news was correlated with their CRT-D scores but did not improve with instruction. A comparison group of adults (n = 117) demonstrated similar findings with the exception that source-based instruction improved their news differentiation. These findings suggest that the ability to detect online misinformation is aided by cognitive reflection from the start but could be improved with knowledge of news sources.

CogSci 2025

Children&#39;s Differentiation of Fake News from Real News is Facilitated by Cognitive Reflection

cognitive development

instruction and teaching

psychology

education

reasoning

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair:<br>
*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.*<br>
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ACL 2025

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

Children's Differentiation of Fake News from Real News is Facilitated by Cognitive Reflection

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

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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.

Habits -- automatic behavioral patterns formed through repetition -- are essential for daily functioning, but can also lead to inflexible behavior. While crucial for understanding both adaptive and maladaptive decision-making, studying habits' computational and neural mechanisms has been challenging due to limited laboratory experiments demonstrating overtraining-induced inflexibility.
We developed a novel task with features designed to encourage participants to engage goal-directed (GD) control between trials (interleaving extensively- and minimally-practiced contexts), then naturally release control within trials (hierarchical multi-step trial structure and opportunities to self-correct). 
Results showed that overtrained participants displayed stronger biases toward behaviors learned in extensively-practiced contexts, evidenced by higher Habit Index values at early response times. This effect decreased at later response times, suggesting participants could override habitual impulses with GD control.
Our computational model, characterizing behavior as a mixture of reinforcement-learned policies, reproduced observed behavioral patterns, suggesting that habits can be viewed as goal-directed deployment of overtrained policies.

Computational insights from a novel habit induction protocol

When we produce utterances, we aim to express our message in a coherent way. While listeners generally prefer semantically related constituents to be close together in the string (“local”), certain constructions allow long-distance dependencies (LLDs). There is growing evidence that constraints on LDDs involve information structure, but conjunction is recognized to require its own unique constraints. Here we offer 4 experimental studies aimed to illuminate why conjunctions resist LDDs, by investigating a particular case experimentally in detail: English wh-questions that query only the final conjunct in verb phrase conjunction. The first two studies demonstrate that gradient acceptability is predicted by the extent to which a conjunction expresses a single complex event rather than two separate events. Exp. 3 demonstrates a role for the information structure constraint that holds of LDDs generally: more prominent (less backgrounded) conjuncts combine with wh-questions more easily. A final experiment manipulates construal as a single event and the prominence of a conjunct. Results demonstrate an additive causal role for both factors.

Islands Result from Clash of Functions: Single-conjunct Wh-Qs

This study explored cross-situational word learning in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children learn words by mapping object names in caregiver utterances to objects in their visual field. We examined the confluence of caregiver object naming and child visual attention in children with and without ASD at play. Head-mounted eye-tracking revealed that children with ASD spent less time attending to named objects than typically developing (TD) children. In both groups, learning input improved as children accrued increased looking time to named objects across multiple naming events. However, for objects with high quantity of naming events, TD children had higher quality learning input than children with ASD. These findings suggest that the input statistics of social interaction are less conducive to word learning in children with ASD. This work has important implications for clinical interventions to scaffold word learning.

Children with ASD show diminished input statistics for word learning during caregiver-child interaction

Future theories of cognition need to encompass a wide range of human experiences, beyond those typically assessed in the laboratory. This study assessed how the experience of a prior artwork (prime) influenced the experience of the next artwork (target), and how this influence was affected by the presence or absence of event boundaries in a VR environment. We found that when primes were more emotionally intense, targets were rated lower in liking/beauty and emotional intensity. This influence was attenuated when the paintings were separated by an event boundary (separate rooms). Surprisingly, there was an effect of event boundaries on the processing of the prime paintings. An evaluation of additional data suggests that this is due to the mere presence of another painting in the same room, even before it is actually viewed. Thus, event structure can meaningfully impact the experience of viewing art.

Event Structure and the Experience of Viewing Art

As we interact with the world, we learn how to allocate our attention effectively to achieve our goals. In this study, participants’ eye movements were tracked as they engaged in a same-different task with novel stimuli. Participants then completed a goal-directed task using physical copies of the items. In the task, the goal-relevance of the attributes varied. This was followed by a second block of the same-different task. We analyzed how attention to the goal-relevant, goal-incidental, and goal-irrelevant attributes of the items shifted from the initial block of the same-different task to the second. The gaze patterns clearly distinguished between the goal-relevant and goal-irrelevant attributes. However, there was no distinction between the goal-relevant and goal-incidental attributes. We discuss the implications for understanding how goal-directed interactions shape attentional allocation and how this relates to what people learn about the items.

Using Goal-Incidental Attributes to Assess the Relationship Between Selective Attention and Attribute Centrality

Why do we say ''grasp an idea” but not ''hold an idea,” or ''small talk” but not ''little talk”? Although these word pairs share similar meanings, they differ in their tendency to be metaphorically extended. Prior research has focused on how well source concepts map onto target meanings to explain why some words are more readily extended to novel metaphorical contexts. However, much less attention has been paid to how the structural properties of a word’s semantic network contribute to its patterns of metaphorical extension. Using a large-scale dataset of semantic networks in English (De Deyne et al., 2019), we explored whether these structural properties predict selective extension in a metaphor rating study with English speakers, who were presented with Mandarin metaphorical expressions that lack direct English equivalents. Our findings revealed that English speakers systematically favor certain conceptual mappings from Chinese, suggesting that some metaphorical mappings may be universally recognized. However, when controlling for conceptual mappings by analyzing synonym pairs, we found that the structural features of a word’s semantic network significantly predict rates of extension. Specifically, words embedded in densely interconnected neighborhoods showed stronger resistance to extension, while words bridging diverse semantic communities demonstrate greater mutability.

Words with more diverse semantic networks are more readily extended to novel meanings

Humans make decisions collectively by combining individual and social learning. Individuals benefit from groups when individual exploration fails to accurately assess the environment, a phenomenon known as the “wisdom of crowds.” Previous studies indicate that self-organizing group dynamics can reduce suboptimal biases in noisy environments, particularly in fully connected groups. However, agents often have only partial information due to cognitive and physical constraints. To explore how diverse social network structures influence the collective dynamics of social learners, we integrate a decentralized network with a social reinforcement learning model in repeated two-armed bandit tasks. Our results suggest that: 1. Social learning in a sparse network outperforms asocial solo learning in highly uncertain tasks. 2. The phenomenon “less is more, and more is different” holds true only when agents strategically balance individual and social learning. 3. The group size effect on collective performance is significantly influenced by network structures.

Collective Behavior Emerging from Social Learning Strategies and Network Structures

Decades of research in cognitive science and AI have focused on compositionality as a hallmark property of the human mind. This focus can seem to frame the question as though we must classify systems as either compositional or idiomatic, cognitive or associative. In this talk, i describe a set of related but different empirical studies of how neural networks achieve, or fail to achieve, compositional behavior. I argue that these findings point to a middle ground in which traditional “symbolic” compositionality can be seen as a special case which is emergent—but nonetheless qualitatively different—from a more general associative mechanism characteristic of neural networks.

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Computational insights from a novel habit induction protocol

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Next from CogSci 2025

Computational insights from a novel habit induction protocol

Similar lecture

Generate First, Then Sample: Enhancing Fake News Detection with LLM-Augmented Reinforced Sampling

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads