United States

Groupitizing, the ability to use perceptual grouping to facilitate enumeration, appears with schooling and predicts math achievement (Guillaume et al., 2023). Our study (Spring 2025) investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying its development and enhancement during early education.

We propose that groupitizing among young children involves two core processes: (i) subitizing to identify the numerosity of small subgroups and (ii) using perceptual grouping to perform mental arithmetic, such as addition or multiplication.

To test this hypothesis, children from kindergarten through second grade will perform an enumeration task involving dot sets organized into various grouping structures (subgroups with equal or differing numerosity) and various grouping patterns (subgroups with consistent or varied shapes). Response times and error patterns will be analyzed, alongside children&#39;s counting knowledge, arithmetic skills and math achievement.

Our results aim to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms underlying groupitizing across development, and the links between foundational perceptual skills and higher-order mathematical reasoning.

CogSci 2025

Understanding the cognitive mechanisms behind groupitizing in early education

developmental analysis

cognitive development

skill acquisition and learning

psychology

education

### 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.

Groupitizing, the ability to use perceptual grouping to facilitate enumeration, appears with schooling and predicts math achievement (Guillaume et al., 2023). Our study (Spring 2025) investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying its development and enhancement during early education.

We propose that groupitizing among young children involves two core processes: (i) subitizing to identify the numerosity of small subgroups and (ii) using perceptual grouping to perform mental arithmetic, such as addition or multiplication.

To test this hypothesis, children from kindergarten through second grade will perform an enumeration task involving dot sets organized into various grouping structures (subgroups with equal or differing numerosity) and various grouping patterns (subgroups with consistent or varied shapes). Response times and error patterns will be analyzed, alongside children's counting knowledge, arithmetic skills and math achievement.

Our results aim to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms underlying groupitizing across development, and the links between foundational perceptual skills and higher-order mathematical reasoning.

poster

Previous research has proposed that bilinguals would rather be redundant than ambiguous. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment examining lexical ambiguity in spoken Mandarin at the tonal, segmental, and orthographical levels. Using a picture naming task, we explored how L1 Mandarin L2 English speakers in the UK and more-monolingual speakers in China resolve ambiguity by analysing their verbal responses when naming pictures, manipulating whether the context in which a picture is named makes the preferred label ambiguous (e.g. do speakers avoid saying “fen3 si1” when describing a picture of glass noodles when it appears alongside a picture of fans which shares the same label? do bilinguals avoid this ambiguity more than more monolingual peers as claimed?). Our results do not support this hypothesis, as no reliable differences between groups were found. Despite the null results, we observed several interesting patterns worthy of further investigation.

Do bilinguals avoid ambiguity? An experimental study of lexical ambiguity in spoken Mandarin

Across four experiments, we identified two distinct mechanisms for learning sequential rules: one for capturing arbitrary structures (e.g., a yellow dot followed by a blue dot signals “get ready” then “go”), and another for recognizing intrinsic relationships (e.g., a small dot followed by a big dot signals “get ready” then “go”, perhaps represented by the rule “getting bigger means go”). Both mechanisms support abstract representations, as in Experiments 1 and 2, adults generalized sequential rules to novel combinations. However, Experiment 3 and 4 revealed that when both types of rules were present during learning, intrinsic rules disrupted the abstraction of arbitrary rules. This interference led to poor generalization performance. Overall, these findings suggest that intrinsic and arbitrary systems compete during rule learning, with intrinsic relationships imposing constraints on how sequential patterns are represented. These results are relevant for applications such as syntax learning, human factors, and graphic design.

Intrinsic relations impair abstract rule learning

Children born preterm are at increased risk of delays in early communicative development. However, studies often focus on extremely or very preterm children (< 32 weeks of gestation). To address this limitation, we use data from the Pebbles App, which reflects the gestational age distribution in the population. This app allows caregivers to document their child’s development and assesses the age of attainment of 14 early communicative milestones. Preliminary analyses include more than 4000 children. For most communicative milestones, we did not find significant differences between preterm and full-term children within the first two years using corrected age. However, preterm children acquired some milestones, such as babbling, earlier than full-term children. A possible explanation is the greater communicative experience during the extended time in the extrauterine environment. These findings challenge traditional assumptions about language delays in preterm children and highlight the importance of using more representative samples.

Assessing Early Communicative Milestones in Preterm and Full-Term Children Using the Pebbles App 

Counterfactual reasoning, the ability to reason about how events could have turned out differently, helps individuals understand the causes of events and prepare for the future. The simulation mindset hypothesis posits that exposure to counterfactual scenarios stimulates the generation of imaginary alternatives, enhancing planning, problem-solving, and behaviour adjustment. This study investigated whether  close-counterfactual scenarios prime a simulation mindset in children leading to better problem-solving abilities. Ninety six- and eight-year-olds were assigned to either a counterfactual condition, with storybooks featuring close-counterfactual events, or a control condition, with storybooks describing factual events. Participants then completed two problem-solving tasks requiring the generation of alternative solutions. Results showed that 8-year-olds exhibited better problem-solving abilities than 6-year-olds. Counterfactual scenarios did not significantly affect older children's problem-solving skills, however they showed benefits for the younger children. These findings provide emerging evidence that engaging in counterfactual reasoning can enhance divergent thinking and problem-solving skills in children.

What Almost Happened? Using Close-Counterfactuals to Prime a Simulation Mindset in Children 

This study challenges traditional East-West dichotomies in cross-linguistic cognition by examining event construal preferences across English, Chinese, and Japanese speakers. We investigated how 90 participants (30 per language group) described visual stimuli depicting agent-patient interactions with varying animacy types. Statistical analysis revealed that Chinese speakers' construal patterns aligned with English speakers (p>.05), contrasting sharply with Japanese speakers despite China's cultural proximity to Japan. Both English and Chinese groups demonstrated greater flexibility in perspective-taking across all agent types (human>animal>object), while Japanese speakers showed significantly stronger constraints with inanimate agents (p<.0001). These findings suggest that grammatical flexibility in encoding perspectives, rather than cultural grouping, shapes cognitive preferences in event description. Our results indicate that linguistic structures may influence cognition independently of cultural boundaries, revealing a more complex relationship among language structure, cognitive preferences, and traditional cultural categorizations than previously assumed.

Beyond East and West: Cognitive Preferences in English, Chinese and Japanese Event Description

Math anxiety (MA) reliably predicts poor math performance (MP). Several theoretical mechanisms have been proposed to explain this relation, and numerous interventions have been designed to mitigate it. However, it is unclear whether these hypothesized mechanisms are distinct from one another, and thus it is also unclear whether different interventions target distinct or overlapping mechanisms. We developed indices for the four leading candidate mechanisms in the literature and used a competing mediation framework to test their unique and combined explanatory capacity. Combined, they accounted for 64% of the MA-MP relation, and 3 of 4 candidates provided unique explanatory capacity. While on the whole the current literature seems to have the right of it, our results also indicate there is not a single, unifying key to unlocking the MA-MP relation, and there is unlikely to be a single ‘magic bullet’ intervention. Further theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Testing Explanations for Why Math Anxiety Predicts Poor Math Performance

Probing for experience-driven critical period effects in a large language model

Storytelling, a cornerstone of human culture, thrives on creativity—a domain where modern AI systems often falter. While these systems excel at maintaining narrative coherence, they frequently produce technically sound yet predictable narratives. To address this gap, we introduce IMPROVISER, a collaborative system grounded in psychological theories of creativity, specifically the Blind Variation and Selective Retention (BVSR) framework. IMPROVISER leverages multiple AI personas, each embodying distinct narrative styles, to generate diverse story variations. Users iteratively refine these ideas through selective retention, balancing novelty, coherence, and personalization. In controlled experiments, IMPROVISER outperformed single-persona and chatbot-based systems on creativity and diversity, producing longer, more spatially rich stories without compromising readability. These results empirically validate BVSR’s role in computational creativity and establish a framework for human-AI co-creation, demonstrating how AI can amplify—rather than replace—human creative potential.

IMPROVISER: Multi-persona Co-creation System Enhances Story Creativity

Instructional designers face an overwhelming array of design choices, making it challenging to identify the most effective interventions. To address this issue, I propose the concept of a Model Human Learner, a unified computational model of learning that can aid designers in evaluating candidate interventions. This paper presents the first successful demonstration of this concept, showing that a computational model can accurately predict the outcomes of two human A/B experiments---one testing a problem sequencing intervention and the other testing an item design intervention. It also demonstrates that such a model can generate learning curves without requiring human data and provide theoretical insights into why an instructional intervention is effective. These findings lay the groundwork for future Model Human Learners that integrate cognitive and learning theories to support instructional design across diverse tasks and interventions.

Model Human Learners: Computational Models to Guide Instructional Design

This study investigated how the length of AI-generated text explanations in Japanese influences trust and acceptance in a route selection task, a subjective decision-making task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that AI explanations increased trust and acceptance compared with no explanation; however, there was no significant difference between the effects of 100- and 300-character explanations. Experiment 2 further explored the threshold of explanation length by including 50- and 1,000-character explanations. The results showed that 300- and 1,000-character explanations increased acceptance compared to 50-character explanations; however, no differences emerged among the 100-, 300-, and 1,000-character explanations. Additionally, trust ratings were unaffected by explanation length. These results suggest that AI explanations have a threshold; in this study, AI explanations exceeding 100 characters in Japanese (approximately 50 words in English) did not lead to further changes in users' decisions to accept or reject AI recommendations.

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Do bilinguals avoid ambiguity? An experimental study of lexical ambiguity in spoken Mandarin

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Late cortical response underlying the symmetry-induced numerosity underestimation illusion

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Next from CogSci 2025

Do bilinguals avoid ambiguity? An experimental study of lexical ambiguity in spoken Mandarin

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Late cortical response underlying the symmetry-induced numerosity underestimation illusion

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

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