United States

Linguistic Creativity affects Discourse Expectations

CogSci 2025

Linguistic Creativity affects Discourse Expectations related to Contiguity Relations but not Implicit Causality

language production

creativity

linguistics

discourse

pragmatics

Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalising what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.


ICCC'20

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.
Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviors that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalizing what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.



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. 
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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.

Under construal-level theory, psychologically distant concepts such as a far away land are generally seen more abstractly compared to concepts viewed as closer in time, space, or identity. As we mentally travel through time, dynamics of language contained in streams-of-consciousness may provide a look into how we drift through topical space. Here, we investigated self-convergence and entropy using a BERT-based method to see how language drift over the course of typed streams-of-consciousness may be shaped by temporal framing. We applied this method to a dataset where undergraduate students during COVID-19 shared their thoughts imagining life before, during, and after the pandemic. We find that post-pandemic, future-directed thoughts showcase greater drift compared to past and present thoughts, suggesting greater exploration. Interestingly, past thoughts showed the least drift, suggesting there may be differences in concreteness depending on the direction in time you travel and the ability to have impact over temporally-tethered events.

Thinking through the past, present, and future: Language convergence-entropy is influenced by when you think of and how you feel

We report on an in-progress replication study to test the efficacy of interleaving in U .S. middle-schools. Interleaving combines two learning strategies, discrimination learning and spaced practice, by mixing different problems within an assignment and spacing similar problems across assignments. While the benefits of interleaving are well-documented in controlled experiments, only recently have there been attempts to widely scale this principle to education contexts. The study design is a randomized controlled trial with a sample of 13 classes, 239 students, and 6 schools. Preliminary results show effects in the predicted direction, students who received interleaved practice performed higher than those who received blocked practice (g=.11), but the difference is not significant. While our sample lacks the statistical power to detect effects, we are in the process of collecting data from two additional cohorts. This study contributes to how learning research can be translated to advance learning in authentic contexts.

Scaling Interleaved Practice: Preliminary Evidence and Lessons Learned from a Systematic Replication

In a set of three cross-cultural studies, we investigated how culture, linguistic background, and way of acquiring a bilingual status could affect tolerance for simultaneous identity (the belief that people can be simultaneously part of two social groups). Adults (N =1412), and 5-7-year-old children (N = 166) read stories about three bilingual children who each acquired a second language by different means (through learning, immigration, or parents) and measured participant’s tolerance towards the simultaneous identity. In study 1 and 2 we found that US and Indian bilinguals were more likely to tolerate simultaneous linguistic identity than monolingual groups. In study 3 we find that bilingual 5-7-year-old children from the US and India exhibit a pattern similar to what was previously found in adults. Results suggest that both culture and the experience of bilingualism serve as important mechanisms in shaping our social group cognition.

Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts : Bilingualism Shapes Tolerance for Simultaneous Identities

Comparative illusions, also called Escher sentences, are comparative sentences that appear acceptable but challenge the boundaries of comprehension. Escher sentences, illusions that are the subject of this paper, require structural reinterpretation to resolve their anomalies, making them ideal phenomena for probing the mechanisms of language processing in humans and machines. Using human behavior as a benchmark for large language models' (LLM) performance, we assessed LLMs' behavior with three methods: prompt, probability measurement, and lexical disturbance. Our results indicate that LLMs, when prompted, display "human-like'' behavior, LLMs struggled to reliably rank surprisals, and they were sensitive to both lexical and syntactic cues in Eschers. These results indicate that LLMs seem to manifest the good-enough processing seen in human cognition. Understanding and narrowing this discrepancy could result in AI systems that are more in tune with human reasoning and more interpretable, ultimately enhancing our grasp of sentence processing in humans and machines.

Language models demonstrate the good-enough processing seen in humans

Proportional reasoning is essential for many real-world tasks, yet its developmental trajectory remains debated. Children’s performance in nonsymbolic proportional reasoning varies across tasks and plummets when numerical information is misleading. The present study investigates whether 5- to 7-year-old children can accurately compare proportions in a naturalistic context where counting strategies are ineffective. Children listened to short stories in which a subset of people from each of two groups experienced an event (e.g., catching the flu). Given the equal numbers of affected individuals in both groups and different group sizes, children needed to rely on proportional reasoning to compare the prevalence of the event. Results showed that children performed significantly above chance overall. Moreover, they were more accurate in adverse scenarios (e.g., avoiding illness) than in favorable ones (e.g., acquiring rewards). These preliminary findings suggest that the ability to compare nonsymbolic proportions emerges by age 5 but varies depending on context.

When Simple Counting Fails: Young Children Understand Event Prevalence Using Proportional Reasoning 

Despite a robust body of research supporting the benefits of spaced retrieval practice, few studies have implemented this approach in mathematics education within real-world classroom settings while addressing individual differences, such as variations in students’ prior knowledge and performance levels. The current study tested adaptive spaced retrieval practice in Algebra I classrooms using a computerized system powered by the SuperMemo 2 (SM2) algorithm. Algebra I students practiced 10 selected learning objectives (LOs), with 6 assigned to the adaptive spaced practice condition and 4 to a no-practice control condition. Results revealed that LOs with lower initial accuracy were practiced more frequently with narrower spacing intervals. In contrast, LOs with higher initial accuracy received fewer practices with wider spacing, leading to significant improvements in accuracy from pretest to posttest. Although no significant differences were observed between the spaced practice and no-practice conditions, the findings highlight the potential of adaptive spaced retrieval systems to address individual learning needs to optimize their effectiveness in mathematics education.

Adaptive Spaced Retrieval Practice in Algebra I: A Classroom-Based Study

When interpreting others' actions, humans often rely on beliefs about personality traits or “personality types” to predict mental states and behavior (mentalization). However, individual differences in these intuitive inferences are often overlooked and unmodeled. To address this, we developed a controlled paradigm using Minecraft to investigate how participants' beliefs about player types and personality dimensions influence their judgments of others’ player types. A multinomial regression revealed that the interaction between participants’ ratings of targets on two personality dimensions significantly predicted player type classifications. We tested three competing Finite Mixture Models, each incorporating participants’ elicited beliefs as probability distributions. The models were evaluated using standard metrics, including Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation, BIC, Cross-Entropy, Adjusted Rand Index, RMSE, and correlation, based on their fit and predictive accuracy on unseen data. This novel approach provides a structured way to assess the extent to which participants' reported beliefs explain variability in mentalization performance.

Who am I playing with? Exploring a New Model of Social Categorisation in Mentalisation

Relations like “same” and “different” are among the earliest abstract concepts, and this type of reasoning may be central to human cognition (Gentner, 2003). While relational reasoning is a ubiquitous part of human experience and a key feature of cognitive development, the path that young learners follow as they begin to reason about relations varies across cultures, with children showing differences in both relational matching performance, and preference for relational solutions in an ambiguous context as early as 3 years (Carstensen et al., 2019; Carstensen et al., 2023). Which features of the environment prompt the early emergence of these cross-cultural differences? Several prominent accounts implicate early appearing differences in visual attention, which could facilitate or impair relational reasoning by highlighting the relevant relational context. We explore the role of visual attention in relational reasoning through attention priming with 381 children in two cultural contexts, the US and South Korea.

Exploring the role of visual attention in relational reasoning across two cultures

Judging similarity between pieces of music is critical for interacting with it in everyday life. But how do musical and emotional features drive our subjective judgments of similarity? Much of the previous work has focused on low-level features and has largely ignored the impact of lyrics and emotion on perceived similarity. Here, we tested the influence of a comprehensive set of musical and emotional features on similarity, using original popular songs and cover versions to match clips on lyrics and melody. We found that tempo most strongly predicts lower similarity ratings, but key, voice type, and timbre differences predict similarity in an interactive manner. While emotional arousal did not predict similarity above and beyond tempo, emotional valence did. Together, these results suggest that both musical and emotional factors influence judgments of similarity, shedding light on the fine-grained explanatory mechanisms of listeners’ everyday impressions of popular music.

Musical and emotional features individually and interactively predict perceived similarity of popular songs

What kind of thing is a theory of mind? How can we formalize the various theories of mind we study as cognitive scientists? In this paper, we argue that it is valuable to think of a theory of mind as a kind of programming language: one that is specialized for setting up and reasoning about problems involving other minds. Drawing on ideas from the theory and history of programming languages, we show how this perspective can help us formalize concepts in a theory of mind, precisely articulate differences between multiple theories of mind, and reason about how we develop our theories-of-mind over time. (The full version of this paper is available at: https://kach.github.io/memo/tomalot)

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Next from CogSci 2025

Thinking through the past, present, and future: Language convergence-entropy is influenced by when you think of and how you feel

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Post-creativity and AI: Reverse-engineering our Conceptual Landscapes of Creativity

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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