United States

CogSci 2025

The intuitive theory of care

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.

symposium

### 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.
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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.
<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)**.
<br><br>


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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.

Symbolic writing systems are graphical semiotic codes that are ubiquitous in modern society but are otherwise absent in the animal kingdom. Anthropological evidence suggests that the earliest forms of some writing systems originally consisted of iconic pictographs, which signify their referent via visual resemblance. While previous studies have examined the emergence and, separately, the evolution of pictographic systems through a computational lens, most employ non-naturalistic methodologies that make it difficult to draw clear analogies to human and animal cognition. We develop a multi-agent reinforcement learning testbed for emergent communication called a Signification Game, and formulate a model of inferential communication that enables agents to leverage visual theory of mind to communicate actions using pictographs. Our model, which is situated within a broader formalism for animal communication, sheds light on the cognitive and cultural processes underlying the emergence of proto-writing.

Visual Theory of Mind Enables the Invention of Proto-Writing

This paper presents a proof of principle for Trace Minimalism (Werning, 2020), a novel philosophical framework for episodic memory. Trace Minimalism claims that remembering does not involve the storage of representational content but rather the reconstruction of past scenarios through the interaction of minimal traces with semantic information. Minimal traces establish a causal link to prior experiences but lack categorical and compositional content. We provide a neuro-computational model using a vector-quantized autoencoder and a transformer-based semantic completion mechanism. Our findings support the hypothesis that remembering is possible without representational memory traces and that minimal traces, in interaction with semantic information, reliably construct past scenarios. The results offer a compelling alternative to classical representational theories of memory while maintaining causal continuity with past experiences.

From Minimal Traces to Scenarios of the Past: A Neuro-Computational Model on Regaining Categoricity and Compositionality in Remembering

Linguistic accommodation is the process by which people make their language more like that of their interlocutor, and has been argued to contribute to language change. However, it is unclear to what extent people of different neurotypes accommodate, or how neurotype mixing -- which has been shown to reduce communicative success -- impacts linguistic accommodation. In this paper, we build on previous research which uses artificial language learning to investigate accommodation as a mechanism for linguistic regularisation (i.e., the reduction of variation in a grammatical system). We test the impact of neurotype mixing on accommodation, with the aim of better understanding whether such mixing impacts processes of language change. Our results suggest that both allistic and autistic participants accommodate less and retain less of the variant when in mixed-neurotype pairs, but that this effect is more pronounced in autistic people. We discuss the importance of these results with respect to the Double Empathy theory of mixed-neurotype communication and language evolution.

Neuro-identity mixing impacts linguistic accommodation and regularisation: evidence from autistic and allistic interactions

Aging greatly affects memory, but not all aspects are impaired equally. Past research has demonstrated that older adults show greater deficits in remembering where an object was encountered compared to what was experienced. A third dimension, that has received less attention in this context is memory for when events occurred. In this study, we employed a Sequential Memory Task (SMT) in which participants memorized spatio-temporal visual object sequences over repeated exposures. In two experiments with 39 younger (YAs, 18-35 years) and 53 older adults (OAs, 65-75 years), we examined age-related differences in sequence memory (when) and the interplay between item (what), and location (where) knowledge. Our results revealed that memory was stronger for item sequences than for location sequences or item-location combinations in both younger and older adults. In addition, older adults exhibited greater age-related deficits in location-related memory. We also found that item and location memory were bi-directionally related and that even pure item sequence reports involved location memory and vice versa. Both age groups relied more on item-location binding associations than on transition learning, but computational modeling indicated a higher reliance on independent location transition learning in OAs than YAs. This suggests that the strong age-related impairment in spatial location memory was in part driven by age-differences in memory binding. These findings provide insights into age-related changes in spatio-temporal sequence memory, and highlight distinct learning strategies in younger and older adults.

Age-related differences in forming conjunctive memories of what, when and where

The origin of abstract concepts remains a central question in cognitive science. Empiricists argue that abstract concepts can be learned through a small set of domain-general cognitive mechanisms, whereas nativists argue that most abstract concepts are not learned at all. To explore these opposing views, we examine the abstract concept of number. Drawing on a recent “emergentist” proposal derived from machine learning models, we tested whether stimuli that align with experiences critical for an empiricist view of number perception result in more accurate and less variable numeric estimations. Five- to nine-year-olds were tested on stimuli that conformed to the natural statistics of objects (i.e., number was correlated with features such as cumulative area and spatial position, and the distribution of stimuli was power-law based) or those that did not comply with these statistics. We find little-to-no evidence for predictions of the emergentist theory when presenting children with natural stimuli.

Testing the Emergentist Theory of Number Perception Development

Since at least Plato, geometry has been held up as the model of abstract thought, and great thinkers have sought its origins. Particular, modular “languages of thought” have been invoked to explain humans’ unique cognitive achievements in some domains, including geometry. Contrary to this hypothesis, I propose that human geometry is largely rooted in navigation-like mental processes that merely approximate Euclidean geometry and are shared by humans and nonhuman animals. Humans uniquely can access this geometry with natural language and use it flexibly in novel contexts, ultimately supporting our capacity for formal learning. I thus provide a model for cognitive explanations of uniquely human knowledge that relies on the interaction between our evolutionary cognitive inheritance and our species-unique natural language.

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Next from CogSci 2025

Visual Theory of Mind Enables the Invention of Proto-Writing

Similar lecture

Over Care: Excessive interventions and a lexicon beyond care

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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RESOURCES

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