United States

Language co-activation can strengthen associations between unrelated concepts. We tested whether cross-linguistic phonological overlap impacts semantic processing of non-overlapping written inputs. English monolinguals and Korean-English bilinguals were presented with an interlingual homophone (e.g., “moon”) and a word that is either semantically related (e.g., “lock” – “moon,” the sound /mu:n/ means &quot;door&quot; in Korean, which is semantically related with “lock”) or unrelated across languages (e.g., “fork” – “moon”). While their EEG was recorded, participants had to judge whether the word pairs were semantically related. A smaller N400 effect (difference in ERP amplitude between related and unrelated word pairs) was found in bilinguals than monolinguals, especially for word pairs related in meaning across languages. We conclude that phonological links across languages can connect unrelated concepts, reshaping the lexico-semantic network.

CogSci 2025

Phonological Overlap Connects Semantically-Unrelated Concepts: Evidence from Neural Correlates of Language Co-activation

electroencephalography (eeg)

semantics of language

cognitive neuroscience

language comprehension

psychology

Colleagues and Friends:

I am very happy to welcome you to the 14th annual Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, and to the first virtual edition of our meeting. I want to highlight the important work the CAN meeting chair, **Roger Thompson** and co-chair, **Alyson Fournier**, did to put together the great program we are offering this year. Moving to a virtual format required a complete re-design of the program, and both Roger and Alyson did a splendid job in providing us with an appealing and well adapted program for our first virtual event. I wish to thank them for this very important effort.

Highlights of this year’s scientific meeting include invited speakers **Michael Hausser, Franck Polleux, Gwyneth Card, Magdalena Götz**and Brain Prize winner **Huda Zoghbi**. Plenary and parallel symposia, proposed by our members complete our diverse [scientific program.](https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/program-2021/)

The 2021 Advocacy session, chaired and organized by CAN advocacy committee chair **Karun Singh**, will feature a special lecture and question period with Member of Parliament and past Science Minister **Kirsty Duncan**. This will be followed by a short overview of CAN’s advocacy activities over the last year. We invite you to participate in this session for insight from Dr. Duncan on the workings of Parliament Hill, and to learn more about what CAN has been doing to promote neuroscience research in Canada.

We are also excited to host **Lisa Willis** in the Equity Diversity and Inclusion session, organized by EDI committee chair **Jibran Khokhar**.

A special highlight of our meeting will be the lectures by award-winning young neuroscientists. We are please to host the CAN 2020 Young Investigator Award winner **Mihaela Iordanova**, and CAN 2021 Young Investigator Award winners **Aaron Phillips** and **Tabrez Siddiqui**. Highlights will also include presentation by the top three winners of the CAN-CIHR-INMHA Brain Star Award winners, **Claire Gizowski, Nuria Daviu Abant** and **Lukas Tamayo-Orrego**.

Independently organized satellite symposia complement and complete this exciting program, check them out here: https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/2021-satellite-symposia/

Some of the most engaging sessions are always the poster sessions featuring the work of our trainees, so make sure to log in to Gather Town during the poster sessions to chat with the presenters.
We hope you enjoy this program, and look forward to welcoming you, virtually.

Shernaz Bamji

President of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/b9aea25343a87d5aac3b9367dc780974.jpg)



Please head to https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/registration-2021/ to register. 

CAN-ACN 2021

14th Canadian Neuroscience Meeting from August 23rd-25th

Language co-activation can strengthen associations between unrelated concepts. We tested whether cross-linguistic phonological overlap impacts semantic processing of non-overlapping written inputs. English monolinguals and Korean-English bilinguals were presented with an interlingual homophone (e.g., “moon”) and a word that is either semantically related (e.g., “lock” – “moon,” the sound /mu:n/ means "door" in Korean, which is semantically related with “lock”) or unrelated across languages (e.g., “fork” – “moon”). While their EEG was recorded, participants had to judge whether the word pairs were semantically related. A smaller N400 effect (difference in ERP amplitude between related and unrelated word pairs) was found in bilinguals than monolinguals, especially for word pairs related in meaning across languages. We conclude that phonological links across languages can connect unrelated concepts, reshaping the lexico-semantic network.

poster

### 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. 
<br><br>
* **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.
<br><br>
* **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.
<br><br>

#### 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)**.
<br><br>


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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.

Graphical representations of data are pervasive in modern communication and are often used to convey socio-economic, scientific and medical information. Despite their popularity, it is still unknown whether they can enhance the long-term retention of their content. We conducted an incidental delayed recall task with psychology undergraduates (N=92), in which participants read about the evolution of a socio-economic phenomenon, with few datapoints presented either as a graphics, a text, or a table. We found that graphics facilitated the remembering of the general trends of the data after a two-hour interval. No advantage was found on immediate recall of numerical values in another sample of participants (N=80). Thus, even for equal initial encoding of numerical information, and even for very concise materials, graphics facilitate long-term retention. Overall, the study reveals the potential of graphics as effective tools for enhancing memory retention and therefore highlights their valuable role in educational settings.

The superiority of graphics over text in long-term memory retention

How listeners adapt to unfamiliar talkers and accents is a central question in psycholinguistics. In this study, we explored how listeners dynamically shift mappings from acoustic information to mental representations after hearing a new talker via novel eye-tracking methods. We tested a prediction from Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) that an anomaly in the signal (in this case, a change in talker) increases the influence of bottom-up relative to top-down information, creating an environment where sublexical competitors (e.g. 'Arch' within 'Archer') would be more likely interfere with lexical access for the target. In two experiments (Exp. 1: General American English [GA] talkers; Exp. 2: GA and Spanish-accented [SP] talkers), this prediction was supported via analyses of accuracy, latency, and gaze. In Exp. 2, we found that the effect replicated but did not differ based on the accent of the talker. The data suggest new paths forward in speech adaptation research.

Sublexical ARTifacts: Bottom-up Interference in a Lexical Category Search

Should a health campaign emphasise the potential gains from compliance (e.g., “If you quit smoking, you’ll reduce your risk of lung cancer”) or the potential losses from non-compliance (e.g., “If you don’t quit smoking, you won’t reduce your risk of lung cancer”)? A large literature on so-called goal framing, or message framing, assumes that such messages are equivalent, but their persuasiveness may vary, for instance, depending on the perceived risk associated with the recommended behaviour. As no existing hypothesis received conclusive empirical support, we propose a novel theoretical approach. We argue that goal frames must be analysed as arguments interpreted in con-
text. We report an experiment showing the effect of the participants’ background beliefs about disabling conditions and alternative causes on the persuasiveness of positive and negative frames recommending detection behaviour.

Framing in context: Disabling conditions and alternative causes in health communication

To learn effectively, young children must reason about how difficult a task is and the level of competence required to complete it. Prior research finds toddlers prefer helpers who assist individuals who are less competent or facing more difficult tasks, suggesting that children use these factors to evaluate who needs help. Here, we ask whether children make the inverse inference: Can children use offers of help as a cue to infer either an agent’s relative competence or task difficulty? Study 1 finds that 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 36) infer a student who is offered help is less competent than one who is not (binomial test; p < .001). Study 2 suggests that children rate tasks as relatively more difficult if a student was helped on it (N = 45, p < .05). These results reveal how children use help as a salient cue to learn about others’ competence and tasks in their environment.

Young children use offers of help to infer relative task difficulty and agent competence

Social perception research demonstrates that people can infer the high-level goals driving many motor actions. But what about the rich visuomotor processes underlying such actions? Visually-guided behavior relies on a complex feedback loop between agents and environments, with subtle corrective adjustments made online. What do observers understand about this dynamic? Here, we explore these questions through “pantomimed actions”. We created a stimulus set of videos where agents performed both genuine object-directed actions (e.g. stepping over a box), and pantomimes of those actions (e.g. stepping over an imagined box). Independent subjects then watched these videos and had to determine which videos were which. Collapsing across actions, observers successfully discriminated real actions from pantomimes. However, certain actions were more discriminable than others. This suggests that (1) observers understand how online visual information shapes human motor behavior; (2) The ability to “fake” actions may be more robust than previously suggested.

Who's the actor? Performing and observing pantomimed actions

It remains debated how well any LM is able to understand natural language or even generate reliable metalinguistic judgments. Moreover, relatively little work has demonstrated that LMs can represent and respect subtle relationships between form and function proposed by linguists. We here focus on a particular such relationship established in recent work: English speakers’ judgments about the information structure of canonical sentences predicts independently collected acceptability ratings  on corresponding “long distance dependency” (LDD) constructions, across a wide array of base constructions and multiple types of LDDs.  To determine whether any LM captures this relationship, we probe GPT-4 on the same tasks used with humans and new extensions. Results reveal reliable metalinguistic skill on the information structure and acceptability tasks, replicating a striking interaction between the two, despite the 0-shot, explicit nature of the tasks, and little to no chance of contamination (Studies 1a, 1b). Study 2 manipulates the information structure of base sentences and confirms a causal relationship: increasing the prominence of a constituent in a context sentence increases the subsequent acceptability ratings on  an LDD construction. The findings suggest a tight relationship between natural and GPT-4-generated English, and between information structure and syntax, which begs for further exploration.

For GPT-4 as with Humans:  Information Structure Predicts Acceptability of Long-Distance Dependencies

We examined whether embodiment effects at a particular word influence subsequent words. We recorded EEG while participants read action sentences that were literal-concrete (LC), literal-abstract (LA), and metaphorical (MET). Prior work showed that at the verbs, both LC and MET elicited more negative N400s than LA, reflecting sensorimotor simulations. We found that at the object nouns, LC elicited a more negative negativity in the 500-700 ms time window   than LA and MET, which may reflect combined influences from embodiment spilled over from the verbs and imagery linked to noun concreteness and imageability. These findings suggested that literal action embodiment can yield extended motor engagement extending into subsequent words, but metaphorical action verbs cannot. Moreover, lexical properties at the noun played a role.

What does action do to object? The case of metaphoric action.

Rather than merely solving math problems, students that self-explain correct and incorrect worked examples increase their procedural knowledge and develop deeper conceptual understandings of key concepts. The present study is a large-scale test of the efficacy of the MathByExample intervention, which targets key math concepts and common misconceptions for students in 5th grade through correct and incorrect worked examples. Our cluster-randomized controlled trial included 42 schools (n = 830 5th grade students) across two cohorts. Preliminary results show effects in the predicted direction, students who received MathByExample exercises outperformed students in the control condition, yet the difference is not significant. Our poster will discuss possible explanations for the findings, discuss exploratory moderators (e.g., dosage received of MathByExample exercises), and include data from a third cohort for which data collection is currently ongoing.

Evaluating the Efficacy of MathByExample: Preliminary Evidence 

We study how children develop a causal curriculum to achieve a challenging goal that is not solvable at first. Adopting the Procgen environments that include various challenging game tasks, we found that 5- to 7-year-old children actively used their current level competence to determine their next step in the curriculum and made improvements to their performance during this process as a result. This suggests that children treat their level competence as an intrinsic reward, and are motivated to master easier levels in order to do better at a more difficult one, even without explicit reward. However, our findings also suggest that children’s self-designed curricula may not always be the most effective design. Rather, repeatedly practicing on the difficult target task may be sufficient. Notably, when constrained to stay on the target task instead of crafting their own curricula, more children actually succeeded and made greater progress in the game, suggesting that children perceive a curriculum as beneficial, even when focusing on a singular difficulty might prove more effective.

Children Spontaneously Design Curricula to Tackle Challenging Tasks

Humans can track objects and predict their motion even when they are temporarily occluded. How does the absence of changing visual evidence alter predictive beliefs about a moving object? In our study, participants were tasked with continuously anticipating the destination of a simulated ball in occluded and un-occluded 2.5D environments. Our findings reveal that humans actively update their judgments throughout the period of occlusion while making predictions grounded in physical realism, even as occlusion impairs accuracy. To model this behavior, we integrate perception with physical reasoning, unifying tracking and prediction. This is implemented via massively parallel probabilistic inference in a hierarchical generative model for the motion of intermittently visible objects, represented using the GenJAX probabilistic programming platform. This model predicts time-varying human judgments more accurately than alternative models, suggesting that humans integrate perception and physics to reason about occluded motion. Paper is available at https://arijit-dasgupta.github.io/jtap/.

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The superiority of graphics over text in long-term memory retention

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The superiority of graphics over text in long-term memory retention

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Neurocognitive processes used in phonological and semantic priming: An ERP and oscillatory power study

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