United States

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by cognitive biases that impair emotional information processing. This study examines how acute social stress affects working memory (WM) updating in socially anxious individuals using an emotional 2-back task. A 2×2 factorial design (N = 137) categorized participants into socially anxious (SA) and non-anxious (NSA) groups, further divided into stressed and control conditions. Acute stress was induced via speech anticipation, and subjective stress ratings were recorded. Mixed-
effects modelling revealed independent negative effects of both social anxiety and acute stress on WM updating, including reduced accuracy, increased false alarms, lower discriminability (d-prime), and increased inverse efficiency score. Notably, disgusted facial expressions enhanced task efficiency under stress. Findings suggest stress-related cognitive deficits in social anxiety are additive rather than interactive, highlighting potential
targets for intervention. This study contributes to understanding emotion-cognition interactions and extends research to understudied cultural contexts.

CogSci 2025

The Impact of Acute Social Stress on Working Memory Updating in Social Anxiety Disorder

computer-based experiment

quantitative behavior

statistics

psychology

memory

### 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.

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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.

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The addition of verbal narration could impede reading performance, called the verbal redundancy effect. Two experiments in this study explored the moderating role of readers’ vocabulary size and text difficulty in this effect. A total of 77 native English speakers in Experiment 1 and 45 non-native English speakers in Experiment 2 were divided into two groups of vocabulary-size in each experiment. In both experiments, participants read eight passages and answered questions. The study manipulated the narration presentation and text difficulty. Experiment 1 showed that adding narration impedes comprehension when high-vocabulary participants read easy passages, whereas it enhances comprehension when low-vocabulary participants read easy passages. The redundant narration effect was moderated by reading skills. Experiment 2 showed no significant narration effect, but comprehension scores were higher when high-vocabulary multilinguals read neutral passages with narration than without narration. These effects are aligned with previous research and well explained by cognitive load theory.

Assessing the Verbal Redundancy Effect by Adding Narration to Written Text  in Native and Non-Native Speakers

Children’s emotional development is linked to language
development for typically developing children and deaf
children with native sign language exposure. However,
approximately 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents
who are not familiar with sign language. These deaf children
begin learning a sign language when they attend a school for
the deaf. Late sign language exposure has negative
consequences on several aspects of language development. We
investigate whether acquiring sign language late affects
children's emotion recall and channel of emotion expression.
After watching a silent video depicting emotions, late- and
native-signing deaf children retold the story in Turkish Sign
Language. Results showed that late signers recalled fewer
emotions and used fewer signs and facial expressions compared
to native signers. Manual gestures (non-sign hand movements),
head and body movements did not differ across groups. The
findings suggest that late sign language acquisition negatively
impacts deaf children’s ability to recall and express emotions,
highlighting the importance of early language exposure for the
development of emotion recall.

The Effects of Late Sign Language Acquisition on Emotion Recall and Expression in Deaf Children

Information disseminated through mass-media has been known to significantly influence behaviors such as voting (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987), brand preferences (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981), and public opinion (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). More specifically, the way information is framed and presented in mass media (for instance through “breaking news” and “sensational headlines”) can reinforce existing beliefs and contribute to political and ideological polarization, with partisan media creating "echo chambers" that deepen biases (Hobolt et al., 2024). The current study leverages these insights to investigate the effects of the echo-chambered media and the time available for information consumption in an intergroup context across three experiments. Going by the minimal group paradigm, Experiment 1 employed a randomized, untimed presentation (non-echo-chamber) of news about an ingroup and an outgroup, while Experiment 2 used a blocked, untimed design (echo-chamber), and Experiment 3 a blocked, timed design (echo-chamber, doomscroll). All experiments involved two news sources with varying reliability (low and high) disseminating valanced (positive/negative) intergroup news headlines, and the participants were asked about the degree to which they believed the specific news items. Results showed that the manner of news presentation and timing moderated ingroup favoritism, with higher propensity to believe positive ingroup than positive outgroup news and vice-versa for the negative news, with the most significant bias emerging in Experiment 2 and negative news bias in Experiment 3. These findings shed light on how patterns of media consumption may influence intergroup perceptions and lead to polarization in society.

Scroll-Time and Echo-Chambers: Effect of Mass Media on Ingroup Bias and Polarization

Why do certain past events resurface more often in our thoughts?  This study investigates the factors influencing retrospective mind wandering, particularly concerning incomplete or unresolved experiences. We used a custom-designed game in which in-game events were systematically varied, then assessed participants’ spontaneous recall of those events one week later.  Results revealed that offline participants and those familiar with the experimenter were likelier to experience game-related mind-wandering. The strongest predictor of recall was the time spent engaged with the game, highlighting the importance of memory encoding strength. While individual rumination tendencies did not predict whether participants would recall the game, they did predict the frequency of such episodes among those who did. Thoughts centered on the game’s protagonist over peripheral details, suggesting narrative salience.  Based on these insights, we propose an initiation maintenance model of retrospective mind wandering, which integrates bottom-up and top-down processes to generate and persist spontaneous thoughts.

Testing the Zeigarnik effect in spontaneous memory recall during mind-wandering

We investigated selective attention towards high- versus low-calorie foods in individuals with normal (BMI 18–25) and high BMI (>25) using eye-tracking. Participants performed a central letter discrimination task while irrelevant food images appeared peripherally (5° from fixation). We measured the probability and latency of first fixations. High BMI participants were more likely to initially fixate on high-calorie processed foods. On the contrary, the normal BMI group showed a bias towards low-calorie foods, although this observation needs further investigation. These attentional biases occurred despite controlling for perceptual differences between images. The high BMI group showed a bias in the left visual field, as predicted by the literature on dominance of the right hemisphere in rewarding stimulus processing. This early, automatic attentional bias may contribute to unhealthy eating patterns and has implications for understanding cognitive mechanisms involved in obesity, particularly the role of bottom-up attentional capture by rewarding food stimuli.

Gaze and Gluttony: How BMI Affects Our First Fixations

Although the MINERVA 2 model provides a detailed account of many findings related to episodic memory, its assumption that primary (working) memory is a single vector of features is unrealistic because it fails to explain the feature-binding problem—how the features of multiple items or objects can be simultaneously maintained but still differentiated. For example, the model cannot explain how the features of “red circle” and “blue square” would be maintained in primary memory in a manner that allows the color features to be correctly associated with their respective shapes. Here we propose a more plausible, biologically inspired implementation of primary memory within MINERVA 2, evaluating its performance using serial-order memory tasks and contextualizing the model’s new assumptions within the broader cognitive science and neuroscience literatures.

Oscillating Echoes: Primary Memory in MINERVA 2

This study examines convergence between parental reports and behavioral measures in assessing early word knowledge of twenty-eight 14-month-old Korean infants. We compared infants' word recognition patterns with parental reports using full and shorter versions of the Korean MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MCDI-K). Our analyses revealed three key patterns. First, while parents showed consistent judgment between the full CDI and the target-word checklist, the checklist demonstrated better convergence with eye-tracking measures, which accounted for baseline looking biases. Second, parents' reporting accuracy varied systematically with item difficulty: for early-acquired words, parents showed higher agreement with eye-tracking than for later-acquired words. Third, exploratory analyses suggested a possible asymmetry in word category recognition, with infants showing stronger recognition of nouns than verbs in the eye-tracking task, contrasting with more balanced verb-noun knowledge in parental reports. These findings show that assessment methods capture different aspects of early word knowledge.

Looking beyond parental reports: systematic biases in early word recognition assessment

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, they still struggle with reasoning over table-based structured data, particularly in zero-shot settings. Tasks like question answering (QA), SQL generation, and numerical reasoning often fail due to insufficient task-specific training. To address these challenges, we propose CoRe (Cognitive Reasoning Framework for Structured Data), inspired by cognitive science principles of hierarchical and iterative reasoning. CoRe structures reasoning into multiple stages, allowing LLMs to better navigate the intricacies of table-based data. Evaluations using advanced LLMs, including Qwen-Plus, GPT-4o mini, and GLM-4-Plus, on datasets like HybridQA, BIRD, and DocMath-Eval show consistent performance improvements. CoRe outperforms zero-shot state-of-the-art (SOTA) on HybridQA and BIRD by 11.4% and 1.8% in Exact Match (EM) respectively, and achieves the best accuracy on DocMath-Eval’s complong subset with 37.0%, approaching RAG-based SOTA. These results highlight CoRe’s effectiveness as a robust framework for zero-shot reasoning over structured data.

CoRe: Cognitive Reasoning Framework for Zero-Shot Table Understanding and Reasoning

Research has indicated that baseline pupil size may reflect attentional control capabilities. Several studies have demonstrated links between resting pupil measurements and various cognitive functions, including working memory capacity and fluid intelligence. The existing literature presents mixed evidence, with some studies supporting this relationship while others fail to replicate these findings. Moreover, the validity of this relationship across different populations has come into question, particularly when considering age-related physiological changes that affect pupil size. Our study sought to investigate whether the relationship between baseline pupil size and attentional control remains consistent across age groups. Results showed no meaningful correlation between baseline pupil size and attentional control. In examining possible explanations for these disparate results, we identified several methodological challenges, including inconsistencies in testing environments and variations in pupil measurement protocols, that may account for the conflicting findings in previous research. These observations highlight the importance of developing more standardized experimental approaches to properly evaluate baseline pupil size as an indicator of attentional control, particularly when studying aging populations.

Is baseline pupil size a good measure to assess attentional control?

We studied gesture and language production in 21 Mandarin-speaking late talkers at 24 months of age and compared them with 28 age-matched typically developing children to determine their gestural and cross-modal communicative abilities. Spontaneous cross-modal data were collected during naturalistic mother-child interactions. Results from the Words and Sentences survey of the MCDI-T showed that late talkers had underdeveloped vocabulary and grammatical complexity. Nonetheless, their gestural competence was intact and comparable to that of typically developing children. Both groups demonstrated similar patterns in using declarative pointing, imperative pointing, showing, giving, representational, and conventional gestures to achieve communicative goals. Among these, declarative pointing was the most common for establishing joint attention and sharing interests or information with the addressee. Although late talkers were capable of reinforcing, clarifying, and supplementing speech with gestures, they did so less frequently than their typically developing peers. In sum, late talkers used gestures effectively to support communication; however, they showed limitations in integrating varied information for cross-modal communication.

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Assessing the Verbal Redundancy Effect by Adding Narration to Written Text in Native and Non-Native Speakers

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