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CogSci 2025

Interfering with inner speech during action encoding impacts their execution

cognitive neuroscience

language production

learning

action

psychology

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2022

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 pseudosciences often bear a striking resemblance to the sciences. Using a mimicry account as a framework, this paper investigates how the appearance of social media posts influences people’s perception of the content of such posts as scientific. We present the results of two empirical studies. The first, preparatory study, identifies typical characteristics of “scientificness” in social media posts to inform feature manipulation within the main study. The main study then examines what happens if the features are systematically manipulated. The findings support the hypothesis that pseudoscientific digital content benefits from using features of scientificness. We discuss implications for understanding the appeal and persistence of pseudoscience.

The illusion of credibility: How the pseudosciences appear scientific

The impact of hormone contraceptives on cognitive function in young women remains a topic of ongoing debate, with inconsistent findings across studies. While some research suggests a beneficial effect on cognitive performance, others report no effect. The variability in these reports may be due to the different types of hormone contraceptives available, each potentially influencing memory differently. The present study examined the effects of progesterone-only contraceptives and combined hormone contraceptives (consisting of estrogen and progesterone) on spatial memory performance using the landmark memory task in young women (18-25 years old). Results indicate no significant differences in landmark memory task scores between naturally cycling women and those using hormone contraceptives. There were also no differences in spatial task scores between women using progesterone-only contraceptives and those using combined hormone contraceptives. These findings suggest that the use of hormone contraceptives does not significantly impact spatial memory performance in young women.

The Effects of Hormone Contraceptives on Spatial Task Performance in Young Women

Predictability effects of Spanish-English code-switching: A directionality and part of speech analysis

The apparent redundancy of grammatical gender systems presents a puzzle to which information theory offers a solution: since nouns are the least predictable part of language,  dividing nouns into semi-arbitrary classes reduces the uncertainty associated with them. Corpus studies show both how gendered articles make nouns more predictable, and how in languages that lack noun class, prenominal adjectives serve a similar function. This raises the question of whether language users are sensitive to this information and actually employ it in communication.  In an elicitation study, we manipulated the contextual information provided by gendered articles to German speakers, and compared their behavior to English speakers (whose articles are always uninformative). When German articles were uninformative, German and English speakers produced prenominal adjectives at the same rates. However, when articles were informative, German prenominal adjective production decreased. These results illustrate how languages use both articles and prenominal adjectives to support communicative efficiency.

How grammatical gender supports efficient communication 

Are some languages more appealing than others? And do specific linguistic features, such as phonetic or prosodic characteristics, contribute to this perceived beauty? Previous studies have been inconclusive, mostly because they primarily relied on subjective ratings prone to social desirability biases. To overcome this limitation, we explore a novel approach, using pupil size as a proxy for linguistic appeal. Pupil dilation has been linked to pleasurable stimuli, such as music and environmental sounds, suggesting similar reactions for appealing languages. In our experiment, participants listened to artificial languages modeled on the phonetic structures of real languages, while their pupil size was measured. By combining this eye-tracking data with traditional ratings, we demonstrate that (a) eye-tracking is a reliable method for investigating phonaesthetic appeal and (b) languages with different linguistic characteristics vary in their perceived attractiveness. This interdisciplinary approach sheds light on the cognitive processes underlying the aesthetic perception of languages.

From the ears to the eyes: using pupil size to explore the perceived appeal of languages

There are binary optical illusions that people typically perceive only one of the two images. These illusions involve a cognitive process. The process seems to on the edge between System 1 and System 2 and doesn’t seem to be a conscious choice. In one well known example, people see either the old woman or the young lady and have difficulty perceiving the other image. We have found a way to manipulate an example of a binary choice perceptual illusion that starts with one image and at a particular point in the transition promptly switches to the other image in a Gestalt sense. The process is repeatable, reversable, appears to be stable over many repetitions, and has several characteristics that can be manipulated, such as the number, density, and size of the object(s) and the rate of change. The poster shows how to do this with a simple protocol.

Detecting an illusion's perception change

Navigating social affiliation adaptively is a critical task of human life. If parsing the social world into affiliative groups forms a core, generative mechanism of the evolved human mind, even infants may differentiate between minimal depictions of inclusion and exclusion. Furthermore, whether groups include or exclude others may cue their individual value as social partners. If so, infants may expect third-party observers to continue avoiding those others exclude and prefer those they include, further perpetuating discrimination of the already marginalized. Here, we show that 10-18 m.o. infants (n=96) look longer when a neutral observer approaches a novel agent whom an abstract group previously excluded, rather than included, in an animated violation-of-expectation paradigm. We found no effect of participant age. Movements were identical across scenarios, differing only in a delay between the excluded agent and the group. These findings indicate that even infants infer that observed exclusion versus inclusion will generalize to other interactions with new social partners.

Infants and Toddlers Expect Others Will Shun the Previously Excluded and Instead Approach the Previously Included

In our poster, we challenge the multiple-choice paradigm used in many communication experiments and the validity of conclusions that can be drawn from it. We concentrate on two well-constructed experiments that have made claims that humans can understand improvised or interspecies forms of communication (e.g., Ćwiek et al., 2021; Graham & Hobaiter, 2023). We hypothesized that participants would perform worse when asked to provide free-text answers, compared to the original design of multiple choice. Our results indicate that participants performed worse compared to the original studies. The post hoc analysis showed that, in many cases, relevant semantic domains were correctly identified by the participants, but hardly any responses were fully congruent with the target concept. We conclude by discussing which types of questions are better addressed with the multiple-choice vs. open-text paradigm, and how the results of each of them can be mapped onto a larger picture of language evolution.

References
Ćwiek, Aleksandra, Susanne Fuchs, Christoph Draxler, Eva Liina Asu, Dan Dediu, Katri Hiovain, Shigeto Kawahara, et al. 2021. Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures. Scientific Reports 11(1). 10108. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89445-4.

Graham, Kirsty E. & Catherine Hobaiter. 2023. Towards a great ape dictionary: Inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures. (Ed.) Frans B. M. De Waal. PLOS Biology 21(1). e3001939. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001939.

What do we understand from experiments in language evolution: inferences from multiple-choice vs. open-ended semantic space paradigms

Curiosity is often viewed as information-seeking to fill knowledge gaps arising from expectation violations, typically measured statistically. However, natural systems can be represented as binary relational graphs consisting of entity types, instances, and collections, all of which must maintain relational consistency to ensure a coherent system. This consistency is assured through closure, making its interpretation central to behaviors such as curiosity. When curiosity is defined solely in statistical terms, it fails to guarantee relational consistency - a critical limitation. In contrast, interpreting the three components through closure offers a robust mechanism for verifying relational coherence. Closure is achieved when all relations are in agreement; any deviation signals inconsistency. In the absence of closure, agents seek to achieve closure by bringing in evidentiary support from memory and reinterpreting the relational structure. In this view, curiosity signals act by morphing interpretation to achieve relational closure, enabling the acquisition of coherent knowledge.

Curiosity as a Morphism of Interpretation

Also known as the Ganong effect, a lexicality bias effect- i.e., the bias to interpret an ambiguous sound as the phoneme that yields a real word in its context - has been widely replicated. The search for a similar frequency bias effect, on the other hand, has yielded mixed results: In English, a bias has been observed such that listeners tend to interpret an ambiguous sound as the phoneme that yields a higher-frequency word, but this has failed to be replicated in Mandarin. One difference between these studies is the use of monosyllabic vs. disyllabic stimuli. To determine the factors that influence the presence of a bias effect, the present study tested for both frequency and lexicality bias effects using monosyllabic and disyllabic stimuli in Cantonese. Results show that the lexicality and frequency bias effects can be elicited in both monosyllabic and disyllabic stimuli, but the frequency effect is weaker.

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The illusion of credibility: How the pseudosciences appear scientific

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