United States

Cognitive science offers powerful tools for addressing pressing public health needs. Here we apply the cognitive science of intuitive theories and the tools of Bayesian networks to shed light on why so few children in the US have received COVID vaccines and how we might encourage caregivers to seek out these and other life-saving vaccines for their children. 1700 US parents completed 13 belief scales on a range of topics likely to influence their endorsement of pediatric COVID vaccines. We deployed structure learning techniques to develop a cognitive model of the relationships among beliefs and their influence on endorsement of vaccines for children, which accounted for 70% of the variance in participants’ beliefs in a held-out testing split. Model-based simulations suggested that educational interventions focused on the effectiveness of COVID vaccines for supporting individual and community health may be most effective in increasing uptake of the COVID vaccine for children.

CogSci 2025

Modeling a network of beliefs surrounding parents’ endorsement of COVID vaccines for children

behavioral science

computational modeling

bayesian modeling

decision making

psychology

causal reasoning

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

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)**.
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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.

Semitic languages are characterized as having two types of discontinuous morphemes: roots and word patterns. The role of these morphemes in lexical access and representation remains debated, especially in the case of word patterns. Roots exhibit robust priming for both nouns and verbs, while word patterns yield mixed results—verbal patterns tend to show stronger priming effects than nominal ones. While previous research (e.g., Deutsch et al., 1998) suggested that differences in productivity might explain these word class effects on word pattern priming, no study has directly investigated this hypothesis. To isolate the contributions of productivity and word class, we used a 2×2 factorial design crossing productivity (high vs. low) with word class (verb vs. noun). This design allows us to disentangle the two variables that were previously confounded in studies such as Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson (2015). We did this using a masked visual priming experiment in Arabic. We found that, regardless of word class, high- productivity patterns showed robust priming, whereas low- productivity patterns did not. Additionally, priming from high- productivity patterns was distinct from semantic and orthographic effects, confirming the independent role of word patterns in morphological decomposition. These results support the dual-route model of lexical access (Baayen et al., 1997).

Morphological Structure in the Arabic Mental Lexicon: Productivity and Priming Effects in Nominal and Verbal Patterns

This study investigates how expertise influences the mental representation of dance choreography, focusing on differences between expert and novice ballet dancers. Event Segmentation Theory (EST) was used to examine chunking in a 50-step ballet sequence. Participants, classified as experts or novices based on dance experience, were tasked with segmenting choreography across repeated viewings. Results showed that experts segmented the sequence into fewer, larger chunks, and showed greater consistency and greater similarity with each other. Novices, in contrast, identified more segments and showed less agreement. These findings underscore the role of domain-specific knowledge that incorporates the structure of the domain in forming mental representations, and sets the stage for exploring how this may enable superior expert learning and memory for very long sequences of dance.
Keywords: expertise; event segmentation; chunking; dance memory

Breaking it Down: Expertise and Dance Segmentation

The Self-Prioritization Effect (SPE) suggests that
associating stimuli with the ‘self’ affords processing
advantages in perception (Sui & Humphreys, 2012),
attention (Keyes & Brady, 2010), long-term memory
(Turk et al., 2008; Klein, 2012), working memory (Yin
et al., 2019; Roy et al., 2023), and decision-making
(Polman, 2012; Hu et al., 2019). An important aspect
of working memory is the ability for continuous
tracking, maintenance & updation. The Multiple-
Object Tracking (MOT) paradigm involves constant
attention and maintenance in working memory and
online decision-making. The current study was
designed to test the tracking performances for self-
associated stimuli (neutral shapes and colored shapes)
compared to stranger-associated stimuli (neutral
shapes and colored shapes) in a multiple object
tracking (MOT) paradigm. Additionally, we used
three different set-sizes (6,8,10), where half of the
shapes were targets, and half were distractors, to check
for boundary conditions with respect to WM load. We
found that with increasing set-size, tracking
performance decreases significantly. Also, whether
targets or distracters belong to the same
(homogeneous) or different categories
(heterogeneous) moderates the tracking performance
of the participants, as target shapes becomes more
complicated when the target and distracters are of the
same type, i.e., the homogenous conditions. We found
that the tracking performances of the self-associated
shapes were significantly better than the stranger-
associated target shapes when the target and
distractors were of different categories (heterogeneous
condition) but only upto set-size 8 due to working
memory limits. Additionally, we found that self-
associated shapes or colored shapes were significantly
poorer in tracking when target and distractors were of
same categories (homogeneous condition) within the
working memory limits. These results suggest that
individuals can pay more attention to self-associated
stimuli, which are maintained in working memory and
have better focus of attention, despite limited capacity
WM resources.
Keywords: self-association, tracking, multiple
object tracking, working memory, visual working
memory, identity, location.

Self-Association Makes It Easier to Track Multiple Objects But Within Capacity Limitations: A Multiple-Object Tracking Investigation 

Prevalence-induced concept change (PICC) occurs when reduced category prevalence  increases the likelihood that ambiguous stimuli are classified as belonging to the now-minority category. PICC has been observed across perceptual and social domains and persists despite instructions or incentives to suppress it. However, other findings suggest its expression is instead shaped by social context. If AI models are to be treated as theories of cognition, they should exhibit PICC as well. We show that a standard AI model for sequential learning, trained on dynamic category distributions, does not display PICC, instead favoring the now-majority category. This opposite-PICC effect suggests that simple sequential learning may be insufficient to produce PICC. Additional mechanisms, such as structured priors, contextual sensitivity, or internal feedback, seem necessary for its emergence. Our findings contribute to the understanding of PICC and its implications for categorization theories, AI-driven decision-making, and the role of media exposure in shaping social perceptions.

Prevalence-Induced Concept Change: Universal or Context-Dependet? Implications for Social Psychology and AI Cognition

Grounded in predictive processing theory, this study explored the idea that young learners generate top-down expectations about upcoming words, both in meaning (semantic) and sound (phonological), to aid early language development. Researchers hypothesize that language acquisition is facilitated by children’s growing ability to anticipate not only the content of an utterance but also the specific forms those utterances might take. By examining how toddlers transition from broad conceptual understanding to accurate phonological prediction, this work sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms that enable rapid language growth possible in early childhood. The main goal was to determine when and how toddlers begin to form semantic and phonological expectations for upcoming words. To address this, three preferential looking experiments were conducted with Spanish-speaking toddlers at 18, 24, and 30 months. Highly constrained sentences were played aloud while toddlers viewed pairs of images: either a target or a competitor (semantic or phonological) and an unrelated distractor. As the toddlers listened, their gaze patterns revealed whether they anticipated the correct word or a related image before the target was fully pronounced. The rationale was that if toddlers can detect cues in the sentence and map them onto future words, they will show anticipatory looks toward images that match meaning or sound. Analyses revealed a progressive pattern: at 18 months, toddlers clearly predicted specific words in strongly constraining contexts, but showed no consistent anticipation of semantic alternatives. By 24 months, toddlers not only looked toward the correct referent but also demonstrated meaningful shifts toward pictures sharing semantic features with the target. This suggests they were extracting and forecasting aspects of meaning ahead of time. However, reliably predicting word forms based on phonological cues emerged more robustly at around 30 months, when children also shifted their gaze to phonologically similar items before the target was spoken. These findings highlight a developmental trajectory in which toddlers leverage broader conceptual knowledge first, refining phonological detail later as their linguistic system matures.

From Meanings to Sounds: Development of Language Prediction in Toddlers

Agent-based models (ABMs) have become a valuable tool in social epistemology for addressing a fundamental question: How should scientists communicate? Yet, ABMs often yield conflicting results—some suggest that high levels of communication decrease group accuracy, while others find it beneficial. Why do models differ so dramatically? We argue that these discrepancies arise from a simple fact: different models use different conceptions of ”communication,” and model qualitatively different phenomena. To demonstrate the effects of such differences, we integrate three paradigmatic conceptions of communication from the literature—direct evidence sharing, belief averaging, and testimony exchange—into a unifying simulation. This allows us to test them under identical conditions. Our findings suggest that communication is generally beneficial. However, the effects of communication vary significantly by which conception one adopts, even under identical conditions. This lack of robustness highlights a critical issue: outcomes depend heavily on how communication is modeled.

Why Models of Scientific Communication Disagree

Humans can reason across multiple domains (e.g., syllogistic, conditional, relational reasoning). Previous research has often investigated these domains in isolation, hence often identifying domain-specific strategies. A fundamental question in cognitive science is, however, if we apply rather a more general reasoning process or more domain-specific mechanisms. To approach this question and allow for analyses and modeling across domains, we first present a general data set that is well-grounded in the state-of-art of reasoning research and covers not only syllogistic, conditional and spatial reasoning, but also includes a test battery (e.g., memory). Second, we investigate relationships between the domains and present a preliminary step towards cross-domain modeling by predicting an individuals' syllogistic conclusion based on behavior observed in the other domains. Our results show that domains are heavily interrelated with subtle differences between domains, highlighting the need for explanations that integrate subtle domain-specific strategies in a general theory of human reasoning.

Using Cross-Domain Data to Predict Syllogistic Reasoning Behavior

Beneficial effects of meditation on mental well-being are not unequivocally confirmed in research (Goyal et al., 2014). In our study (n=19), we hypothesize that meditation (practiced over a longer period of time) impacts emotions and their intensity. We used The Geneva Emotion Wheel in meditation sessions (n=12) performed regularly over a 12-week period of time, from April to July, 2024. We controlled depression and personality type. Emotions were measured before and after each meditation session. Depression was measured before the start of the meditation course and at the end of it by The Patient Health Questionnaire (Kroenke et al., 2001). Personality traits were tested once - before the start of the meditation course by Big Five Inventory-10 (Rammstedt & John, 2007). The results showed that meditation had a positive effect on several emotions and their intensity, but the effect on depression was not found.

Effects of meditation on emotions and depression: a longitudinal study using Geneva Emotion Wheel 

Sentences with plural definites like ‘the circles’ are usually
interpreted akin to universally quantified sentences (maximal
reading). In some circumstances, however, they also allow
for non-maximal readings, i.e imprecise readings that allow
for exceptions. We report two mouse-tracking experiments
that investigate the online derivation of these non-maximal in-
terpretations of plural definites. Our results show that non-
maximal readings are harder to process than maximal interpre-
tations. This difficulty seems to be associated to hesitation in
the decision-process rather than to a truly two-step derivation.
Interestingly, we also find that experimental setup plays an im-
portant role in the availability and difficulty linked to these
readings.

Processing non-maximal readings of sentences with plural definites

People contribute to new creations through different tasks, skill and effort. How do these contributions influence judgements of ownership? Past research has shown that initial effort towards a goal and net labour contribution are both relevant to intuitions about rightful ownership. However, their relative weights remain unclear, and hence often have different implications about who the owner should be. Here, we examine ownership judgements of new creations, contrasting different contributions. Across four online experiments (total N=704), we describe an initiator and a completer who work together on the creation of a new object, with their contributions varying in terms of effort, skill and how much they meet the original goal. We find an especially strong preference for the initiator to take ownership. This may be because initiation seems more necessary: without it, the subsequent steps of creation would not be needed.

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Morphological Structure in the Arabic Mental Lexicon: Productivity and Priming Effects in Nominal and Verbal Patterns

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