United States

Past research reveals sex differences in spatial ability measures. This study further examines this variation across a comprehensive range of spatial tasks and explores potential mediators. 259 participants completed psychometric measures, questionnaires, and navigation tasks in immersive and desktop virtual reality. Men performed significantly better on both small- and large-scale spatial tasks. Video game experience (greater in men) mediated sex differences on most spatial tasks. However, spatial anxiety and motion sickness (greater in women), and exploration tendencies and risk-behavior (greater in men), generally did not account for this variation. This study reveals significant sex differences across spatial navigation tasks and provides preliminary evidence that experiential factors contribute to this variation. This research has implications for everyday navigation and the effects of technology use (video game experience) on spatial performance.

CogSci 2025

Video game experience mediates sex differences in spatial and navigation abilities

comparative studies

spatial cognition

statistics

psychology

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.

We investigated how the decision environment influences choice and confidence in a binary decisions-from-experience (DfE) task. We manipulated four aspects of the decision environment: option composition (safe vs. risky; SR, or risky vs. risky; RR), the riskiness of the EV-maximizing choice, feedback type (partial or full), and problem order (SR before or after RR). We found that participants made more EV-maximizing choices and were more confident in SR environments and when the EV-maximizing choice was the safer option. Participants' behavior was influenced by their understanding of the payoff structure: confidence dropped sharply after discovering a previously unexpected outcome, and experiencing RR first led to over-sampling and reduced rewards in later SR environments. A computational model incorporating choice and reward history provided a unifying explanation for these patterns. Our results shed light on how decision environment features interact to shape sampling biases, subsequently altering learning and decision-making outcomes.

The Decision Environment and Confidence in Experiential Risky Choice

Sometimes, stimulus preparation is the most resource-consuming stage of experiments on communication. We present an open ready-to-use database of mimed expressive short stories (150 .mp4 files, 03:34:56 of footage) funded by the National Science Centre of Poland under the agreement UMO 2021/43/D/HS2/01866. It can be used as a stimulus in experiments or for annotation or rating. We describe how the database was created: (1) preparation: we used Chat GPT 4.0. to create rich stories, with varying age, gender, number of characters, and themes; (2) recording: we worked with professional actors for maximum expressiveness; (3) editing: we synced front and side shots for maximum visibility; (4) annotating: we analysed representational strategies to argue that the database showcases the potential of pantomime for storysharing and discuss its implications for the pantomimic scenarios of language origins (e.g., Arbib, 2018, 2024; Zlatev et al., 2020).

MESS (Mimed Expressive Short Stories) Database: Showcasing the potential of pantomime for story transmission

How do young children conceptualize parents’ roles? And do these beliefs inform how children learn about the world? Across one study and a preregistered replication (n = 136), we examined whether 5- to 8-year-old children expect parents to protect children from harm and leverage this expectation to learn about unknown objects. Participants watched two vignettes of a child finding a novel object. Either the child’s parent or friend ran and took the object away. Participants were more likely to say that the object was bad (vs. good) when the parent (vs. friend) took it away (E1: b = -1.29, p < 0.001; E2: b = -1.44, p < 0.001). These results suggest that children are not passive recipients of care: Rather, children hold rich theories about the care they receive from their parents (i.e., protection) that allow them to build sophisticated representations about their parents and, in turn, the world.

Children's beliefs about parents drive their learning about the world

People often share their personal data online despite reporting that they should not. They also show surprise and distress when data is used in ways they authorize despite giving consent. But, what underlies this inconsistency in people’s thinking? In the present study, we investigated the proposal that thinking about control over information, or informational autonomy, likely underlies variability in thinking about privacy and data ownership. Namely, we propose that threats to one’s autonomy might account for the aforementioned changes in people’s concern for their data. To test this account, we used a survey-style design to measure how a hypothetical threat to the self, and thereby control, influenced adults’ (N = 51) judgments about the ownership and privacy of their personal data. The threat was police lawfully obtaining their data with a warrant. We found that privacy and ownership judgments significantly increased over time. We also found that the variability in participants’ ownership and privacy judgments was related. Together, our findings suggest that privacy and ownership likely have a shared psychological basis, and this shared psychology can likely explain the variability in people’s judgments about personal data across time.

Data Ownership and Privacy: Investigating a Shared Psychological Basis

Studies in novel word learning show that comparison settings (i.e., several stimuli introduced simultaneously) favor taxonomically-based generalization. Most comparison studies have been done with forced-choice designs. Here, we investigated, in a free-choice comparison design the type of stimuli four and five-year-old children chose in a novel noun generalization task, either from the same basic level category, or a near superordinate category, or a distant superordinate category, but also perceptual, thematic, and unrelated lures. Same basic level category items were more chosen than other taxonomically related items. Perceptual lures and near superordinate items did not differ, suggesting that children did not arbitrate between perception and taxonomy. Results are discussed in terms of different theoretical perspectives on stimulus generalization, lexical constraints, stimulus comparison and finally Bayesian approaches. They suggest that children integrate the results of their comparison rather than sampling probabilistic regularities

Novel Noun Generalization And Stimulus Comparisons In Children: Manipulating The Number And Structure Of Learning Stimuli. 

This study investigated the relationships among infants' attention-following (AF) abilities, caregiver linguistic input, and early language development. Using longitudinal data from home observations (6–9 months) and structured lab assessments (9–12 months), we found that AF performance at 9–12 months was significantly correlated with receptive and expressive language scores at 12 months, though these associations weakened by 18 and 22 months. Caregiver attention-directing utterances were positively associated with both 6-month AF performance and 12-month language outcomes, although their frequency declined from 6 to 9 months, suggesting caregivers adjust their strategies as infants' AF skills develop. Although moderation analyzes did not reach statistical significance, trends indicate that higher levels of caregiver attention-directing speech might enhance the relationship between AF and language outcomes. These findings highlight the dynamic role of caregiver linguistic input in shaping infants' early attention sharing and language development. The results also inform intervention approaches for infants at risk for language delays.

The Role of Caregiver Linguistic Input in Infant Joint Attention and Early Language Development: A Longitudinal Study

Serial dependence is a phenomenon in which current perception is attracted to the immediately preceding perception and is thought to reflect a mechanism for stabilizing perception. It has been demonstrated across a variety of stimuli and has also been observed in the numerosity perception. A previous study suggested that cross-modal serial dependence in numerosity perception from audition to vision did not occur; however, differences in the stimulus presentation format might have prevented serial dependence from emerging. Therefore, we used a standardized temporal presentation format. As a result, we observed bidirectional cross-modal serial dependence between audition and vision. However, the effects in each direction were not consistent within individuals. These findings provide important insights into the mechanisms underlying serial dependence, indicating that both higher-level processing, such as abstract numerical representation, and lower-level processing, such as auditory and visual cortex involvement, are engaged in cross-modal serial dependence in numerosity perception.

Cross-modal serial dependence emerges in sequential numerosity comparison task

Prior research has shown that American children (ages 3 to 8) explore uncertain options at strikingly high rates — even when it comes at a cost to reward maximization, when explicitly instructed to seek rewards, and whether they are choosing for themselves or others. In contrast, adults explore significantly less, showing greater sensitivity to cost. What drives this developmental difference? In a series of studies, we test whether children's exploration is motivated by information value rather than reward value and whether adults also incorporate information value into their decisions. We also examine the role of time horizon in the explore-exploit tradeoff. Our findings reveal that both children and adults consider information value and time horizon when deciding whether to explore or exploit.

Beyond Rewards: How Information Value and Time Horizon Shape Exploration

English-speaking adults demonstrate a strong bias toward processing the beginning of a word when learning to read novel words. This study explored when in literacy development this onset bias emerges. English-speaking pre- and early-readers (4-6-year-olds) were tasked with matching known spoken words (boat) to written text presented with three competitors: a nonword that shared the target’s onset (baot), an English word that shared its offset (goat), and a nonword that shared an onset with the real-word foil (gaot). We then analyzed participants’ accuracy, and false alarm rates to the different competitors. Both groups were above chance in matching known spoken words to their written counterparts. Like adults, children in both groups false alarmed to onset foils significantly more than any other foil. Onset biases were stronger in early-readers than pre-readers, and in children with better word matching skills. The onset bias may be a marker of skilled reading in English-speakers.

Orthographic positional biases in pre- and early readers

In his metaphor of 'behavioral scissors', Hebert Simon proposed that human rational behavior is shaped by scissors whose two blades are the structure of task environments and the computational capabilities of the actor. However, previous work has mostly studied these two blades in isolation. We introduce a new class of models called bounded ecologically rational meta-learned inference (BERMI), which enables the study of the two blades in conjunction. BERMI is rationally adapted to ecologically valid tasks generated by a large language model, while having its computational capacity bounded. We found that BERMI quantitatively explains human choices better than eight other cognitive models in two different category learning experiments. In addition, it captures several qualitative aspects of human categorization, such as learning difficulty and learning speed, better than competing models.

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