United States

Theories of reading are mostly based on English, that is rather atypical among alphabetic orthographies due to its inconsistent orthography-phonology mappings. Differences in length effects have been observed between languages. Psycholinguistic characteristics of the orthography, such as orthographic depth, seem to have an impact on reading strategies and could be correlated with different visual-attentional profiles.  However, no computational model has yet demonstrated the impact of language-dependent visual-attentional mechanisms on reading. This study explores these effects using BRAID-Acq, a probabilistic reading model with a visual-attentional module. We simulated word and pseudoword reading in English, German, and French to examine how orthographic depth and visual attention shape processing. Our simulation results suggest an effect of the orthography on processing time. In particular, English requires a larger attentional quantity for efficient processing of words and pseudowords, offering a novel interpretation of difficulties in reading acquisition in English.

CogSci 2025

Visual attention and cross-linguistic effects in reading: Simulations with BRAID-Acq, a probabilistic model of reading

computational modeling

psychology

reading

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.

The brain utilizes corollary discharge signals to anticipate the visual consequences of saccadic eye movements and provide a coherent visual perception. However, discrepancies between a saccade’s predicted and actual sensory outcomes challenge the brain’s capacity to maintain visual stability. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive computational framework for visual perception incorporating a feedback corrective mechanism that dynamically adjusts predictions based on sensory discrepancies. We show that this feedback mechanism refines internal world models, and provides robust performance with an increasing number of saccades. Our results highlight the delicate balance between the benefits and vulnerabilities of predictive feedback systems supporting and extending current theories of sensory prediction and visual stability.

Feedback-correcting ConvLSTM-driven Neural Model for Stable Saccadic Visual Perception

Humans can perceive causality when viewing collision-like interactions between plain, two-dimensional shapes. To what extent subjective causality reports arise from the physical plausibility of events as predicted by Newtonian physics remains an open question. Here we measured each participant’s perceptual judgments about the contact point angle ($\alpha$) and their causality judgments about the target ball's trajectory offset ($\beta$) using Michotte’s launching paradigm. Our results showed that subjective causality reports decreased as the target’s trajectory deviated further from the physically plausible angle, confirming the important role of physical plausibility in causal perception. Moreover, as uncertainty about $\alpha$ increased, participants were more likely to report events with larger $\beta$ as causal, and their causality reports were more sensitive to changes of $\beta$, consistent with a mental physics model that incorporates $\alpha$. These findings align with predictions of causality perception under a Noisy Newton framework, and provide experimental evidence using individualized uncertainty estimates.

Contact angle uncertainty influences perceived causality in launching events

Rapport is a central component in fostering effective and meaningful interactions between humans and AI agents. It forms the foundation of trust, mutual understanding, and collaboration, all of which are essential for achieving shared goals in cooperative tasks. However, a significant factor influencing rapport development is the diversity of individual differences among human users. This diversity complicates the process of rapport building, as AI agents must adapt dynamically to the unique needs and intentions of individual users. The ability of AI systems to detect and respond to such differences remains a pressing research challenge, as mismatched responses can lead to frustration and disengagement.Theory of mind capabilities enable AI agents to infer user intentions, preferences, and emotional states, while advanced emotion-processing systems allow for nuanced and context-sensitive responses. This study examines how integrating these capabilities into an LLM and RAG enhanced AI Tutor can help sustain engagement and alignment, fostering rapport in Human-AI collaborative learning environments.

Rapport Development in Human-AI Collaboration Tasks

Men hold more power compared to women, a phenomenon that is globally evident and widely documented. Preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance, and by the age of 18 months can distinguish male and female voices and associate them with faces of the corresponding gender. Here, we investigated whether 18- to 24- month-old toddlers (N=48) expected male-voiced agents to prevail over female-voiced ones in a right-of-way conflict. Using a violation-of-expectation paradigm, we found that toddlers looked longest when female-voiced characters prevailed in dominance conflicts, suggesting they expected that male-voiced agents would prevail instead. Acoustic features of male voices that perceptually suggest greater formidability/physical size (i.e., lower fundamental frequency) may account for this effect. Alternatively, vocal indicators of speaker sex might trigger very early conceptualizations about gender and dominance.

Toddlers Use Vocal Cues to Infer Male Dominance Over Females in Right-of-Way Conflict

Cumulative cultural transmission preserves traditional knowledge and practices for generations, yet this phenomenon is understudied in the context of Asian artistic traditions. Indian Miniature painting provides an ideal context for studying the cultural transmission of mastery due to its apprenticeship model embedded in history and tradition. The learning and practice of Indian miniature painting provide an opportunity to examine whether these artistic processes resemble ritualized transmission, characterized by procedural rigidity, adherence to established norms, and religious symbolism. We interviewed 262 artists, ranging from novices to experts from Rajasthan, India, to explore the functions of ritualized transmission in acquiring mastery. The results revealed a strong consensus among artists regarding adherence to structural flow in art production with minimal deviation. Most artists agreed that novices should conform to traditional aesthetics more than experts. Mastery of technical skills and knowledge of cultural traditions were deemed essential before innovation, underscoring how ritualization requires strict adherence to established practices. For many artists, the process resembled a religious act, emphasizing customs, purity, and reverence. Our research highlights the functions of ritualization in acquiring mastery to ensure the preservation of distinctive aesthetics, uniformity in learning, and integration of spiritual and religious beliefs in the cultural transmission of traditional arts.

The Ritualization of Complex Skill Acquisition: Cultural Transmission of Mastery of Indian Miniature Paintings

Large Language Models (LLMs) process language but lack direct sensorimotor experience. This study assesses their ability to estimate human perceptual ratings using the Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms. We prompt LLMs with the original rating task instructions and analyze their correlations with human norms. Results suggest LLMs struggle with embodied cognition, highlighting limitations in computational models of sensory meaning. Future research should explore fine-tuning LLMs on sensorimotor data to enhance embodied representations.

Evaluating sensorimotor knowledge in large language models

Auditory streams with varying features (changing-state, e.g., J,K,L) impair serial recall more than repetitive streams (steady-state, e.g., J,J,J), known as the Changing-State Effect (CSE). Despite extensive CSE research, metacognitive development – how individual monitor recall under auditory distraction – remain unexplored. This study tested 26 adults (Experiment1) and 40 children (5–12 years, Experiment 2) on auditory serial recall and meta-memory accuracy (self-estimate performance). Distractors (steady-state/changing-state letters) followed target sequences of environmental sounds. Results showed: (i) both distractor types modulate meta-memory accuracy (vs. silence) but not serial recall performance (ii) serial recall improved with age and (iii) the discrepancy between meta-memory accuracy and recall accuracy declined with increasing age. These findings reveal distinct developmental trajectories: while serial recall improves steadily with age, metacognitive accuracy in the presence of auditory distraction becomes more precise and less disrupted by such interference as individuals grow older, suggesting divergent mechanisms for memory performance and its self-monitoring under CSE.

Developmental Trajectories of Metacognition in Auditory Serial Recall of Environmental Sounds

Working memory is vital for complex tasks but is under-explored in non-human species, such as horses. This study evaluates horse working memory through an invisible displacement task involving delayed choices. Twenty-six horses were tasked with selecting between two buckets containing a treat, with delay intervals of 10, 30, or 45 seconds between presentation and decision-making. The accuracy of correct choices was influenced by delay duration, presence of distracting stimuli, and performance in basic condition. Results showed that horses could retain information for up to 30 seconds and process information about object displacement. These findings enhance our understanding of horse cognition, revealing their capacity for simple reasoning and a longer working memory span than previously acknowledged.

Working Memory Retention Span in the Invisible Displacement Task in Horses

In this paper, we argue that the contributions of perceivers to object perception can substantially affect what objects are represented in perceptual experience. To capture the scalar nature of these perceiver-contingent contributions, we discuss two grades of subject-dependency in object perception. The first grade, weak subject-dependency, concerns attentional changes to perceptual content like, for instance, when a perceiver is turning her head, plugging her ears, or her attention is primed for a particular cue.  The second grade, strong subject-dependency, concerns generating perceptual objects whose existence depends upon their perceivers’ sensory contributions. We offer evidence from the future-directed anticipation of perceptual experts and from the feature binding of synesthetes to exemplify this nonstandard, subject-dependent form of object perception. We conclude that strongly subject-dependent perceptual objects are more than mere material objects, but are rather a necessary combination of material objects with the contributions of a perceiving subject.

Do perceivers contribute to object perception? 

Based on Blame Theory and Integrative Moral Judgment and Decision-Making (MJDM), this paper examines the role of responsibility for the situation and control over the consequences of the situation in first-person, realistic and non-sacrificial dilemmas. In a 2x2 within-subjects design, 69 participants had to read and solve four dilemmas. Their choice, affect felt, perceived utility, and moral acceptability values were measured. Analyses showed that increased control led to more pro-social choices, and that responsibility increased pro-sociality only when control was low. Control and responsibility also influenced affect, utility, and moral acceptability judgments, corroborating the integrative MJDM model. These results show that control and responsibility play a key role in MJDM but differ from blame theory, where responsibility is necessary for blame and for control to matter. In contrast, in first-person MJDM, control suffices for pro-social action, and responsibility influences decisions only when control is absent.

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Feedback-correcting ConvLSTM-driven Neural Model for Stable Saccadic Visual Perception

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