United States

CogSci 2025

Visual Attention in Crisis

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

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. 
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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.

This study investigates how different modeling approaches affect the measurement of loss aversion, a fundamental concept in psychology and economics. Analyzing 10 datasets comprising over 140,000 trials from 686 participants, we compared four prominent methods: Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Prospect Theory, Bayesian Prospect Theory, Generalized Linear Models, and Drift Diffusion Models. While group-level median loss aversion estimates showed consistency across methods, significant differences emerged at the individual level. The analysis revealed substantial individual-level methodological variability in both the magnitude of loss aversion estimates and participant classification. These findings demonstrate the impact of methodological choices on loss aversion measurement and underscore the need for careful consideration when comparing results across studies using different estimation techniques.

Heterogeneity in Loss Aversion Estimates across Modeling Approaches

Thematic roles in language (Agents, Patients) are considered to be hierarchically organized in terms of their salience, and this hierarchy is rooted in their counterparts as event participants in cognition. Here, we examine the relative salience of Agents over Patients in two-participant causative events in Turkish-speaking 3- to 5-year-old children. We also test if this asymmetry is modulated by the animacy of the Patient (human vs. inanimate object) and specific to the presence of a coherent event. In an eye-tracked change detection task, changes to Agents were detected more accurately (and after fewer fixations) than changes to inanimate Patients when there was a coherent event. This asymmetry disappeared when the Patient was animate (for accuracy) and when event coherence was disrupted (for both accuracy and fixations). These findings suggest an interplay of event roles and animacy in Agent preference.

Agent Preference in Children: The Role of Animacy and Event Coherence

From infancy to adulthood, habituation and dishabituation enable learners to filter out repetitive information and orient to novel information. Because variability in these processes has been linked to differences in later cognitive outcomes, studying individual differences in habituation and dishabituation is crucial for building a more comprehensive model of early learning. Here, we leveraged large-scale datasets spanning infants, preschoolers, and adults to examine how individual differences in habituation predict dishabituation magnitude. We found that faster habituation and higher volatility predicted stronger dishabituation. Moreover, we showed that different measures of dishabituation sometimes yielded divergent patterns, suggesting that measurement choices can influence observed effects and should be carefully considered in developmental research. These findings reveal how endogenous factors are meaningful drivers of looking behaviors. Overall, our results underscore the need for large-scale data approaches to studying visual attention across the lifespan.

Individual differences in habituation predict dishabituation magnitude in adults and infants

Understanding social scenes depends on tracking relational visual information, which is prioritized behaviorally and represented in the superior temporal sulcus (STS), a region involved in processing social scenes. Despite its importance, relational information has been underutilized in computational models of social vision. In this study, we evaluate two neural network models—SocialGNN and RNN Edge—that explicitly incorporate relational cues, and compare their performance to state-of-the-art (SOTA) AI vision models. SocialGNN utilizes a graph neural network to organize input information about each video frame into a graph structure with nodes representing faces and key objects, and edges encoding relational information such as gaze direction and physical contact. RNN Edge is an even simpler model that processes only relational information without node features or graph-based structures. These models were tested on behavioral and neural data from 3-second natural videos of two people engaged in everyday activities, as well as on the PHASE dataset, a collection of 2D animations depicting agent-object interactions inspired by Heider and Simmel. Across both datasets, SocialGNN and RNN Edge achieved strong performance in predicting human behavioral ratings of social interactions and were comparable to SOTA AI models in behavioral encoding tasks, despite being trained on significantly less data and with simpler architectures. Notably, the success of RNN Edge suggests that additional visual features and the graph-based framework of SocialGNN do not significantly enhance performance, underscoring the primacy of gaze and physical contact as essential relational cues. These findings emphasize the importance of integrating relational information into computational models to develop better models of social perception and human-aligned AI.

Relational Information Predicts Human Behavior and Neural Responses to Complex Social Scenes

Understanding how multiple acoustic dimensions are mapped onto linguistic representations is important in speech perception. This study explores how native Mandarin listeners process the communicative intentions of prosodic focus by examining the perceptual weightings of F0, duration, and intensity. Using a Visual World Paradigm, thirty native Mandarin participants listened to re-synthesized audio stimuli and responded to broad-focus or narrow-focus options. Results showed that the acoustic cues significantly influenced focus interpretation, with a greater reliance on F0 than intensity and duration. Eye-tracking data revealed perceptual divergence in the F0 condition, with the divergence of looks occurring at an earlier time window for acoustic processing and later for pragmatic processing. These findings suggest that native listeners effectively map acoustic variations to communicative demands, emphasizing the critical role of F0. The study highlights the temporal dynamics of interpreting prosodic focus, offering insights into language comprehension.

Mapping Acoustic Cues to Pragmatic Functions: Perceptual Cue Weighting of Prosodic Focus in Mandarin

This study investigates how cinematographic techniques influence viewer perception and contribute to the objectification of women, utilizing eye-tracking data from 91 participants. They watched a sexualized music video (SV) known for objectifying portrayals and a non-sexualized music video (TV). Using dynamic Areas of Interests (AOIs)—head, torso, and lower body—gaze metrics such as fixation duration, visit count, and scan paths were recorded to assess visual attention patterns. Participants were grouped according to their average fixations on sexualized AOIs. Statistical analyses revealed significant differences in gaze behavior between the videos and among the groups, with increased attention to sexualized AOIs in SV. Additionally, data-driven group differences in fixations identified specific segments with heightened objectification that are further analyzed using scan path visualization techniques. These findings provide strong empirical evidence of camera-driven gaze objectification, demonstrating how cinematic framing implicitly shapes objectifying gaze patterns, highlighting the critical need for mindful media representation.

Framing Perception: Exploring Camera Induced Objectification in Cinema

The developmental trajectory of delay discounting has been debated for over 30 years, with empirical findings often inconsistent. The controversy stems partly from the absence of formal models to guide empirical investigation and theoretical construction. We proposed a normative model of delay discounting across the lifespan, building on the work of Sozou and Seymour (2003), which emphasizes the tradeoff between mortality, fertility, and parenting in determining delay discounting. We simulated the model across varying parameter spaces and identified a U-shaped association between age and delay discounting, with stronger parental investment postponing the turning point of the function and reducing the overall discount rate. Empirical data supported these predictions, demonstrating a U-shaped age effect and highlighting the role of parental care motivation in explaining cultural and age-related differences in delay discounting. The results suggest that variance in delay discounting can be understood as a rational adaptation to life history tradeoffs.

A Normative Model of Delay Discounting Across the Lifespan: Tradeoffs Between Mortality, Fertility, and Parenting

Lexical ambiguity has classically been categorized into two kinds. Homonyms are single word forms that map to multiple, unrelated meanings (e.g., “bat” meaning baseball equipment or a flying mammal). Polysemes are single word forms that map to multiple, related senses (e.g., “breakfast” meaning a plate of food or an event). Yet there is a longstanding debate as to whether polysemy and homonymy reflect distinct cognitive representations. Some (e.g., Fodor & Lepore, 2002; Klein & Murphy, 2001) posit that they do not—merely describing differing patterns of usage—while others (e.g., Falkum & Vicente, 2015; Pietroski, 2018) argue that polysemes, but not homonyms, involve an underspecified representation that is neutral with respect to the form’s multiple senses. While some extant experimental evidence supports the latter view (Klepousniotou, Titone, & Romero, 2008; Srinivasan, Berner, & Rabagliati, 2019), there has not yet been clear evidence of the representation of lexical ambiguity affecting domain-general reasoning. Using a novel inference paradigm, we compare participants’ dispositions to endorse deductive, Aristotelian arguments with equivocating polysemes versus comparable arguments with equivocating homonyms. We find that participants endorse the former substantially more than the latter, a phenomenon that we dub the Uncommon Sense Effect. Our results provide direct evidence that polysemes and homonyms have underlyingly distinct mental representations—in particular that polysemes uniquely invoke an underspecified representation

Polysemy and Inference: Reasoning with Underspecified Representations

Depression affects everyday decision-making, yet it remains unclear if such effects depend on the decision context or fluctuate over time. In this repeated-measures study, online participants completed a social exchange task (ultimatum game) and a non-social reversal learning task at baseline (n=236) and 1-month later (n=131). Mood symptoms were assessed using the Beck Depression Inventory and the Positive Valence System Scale. Psychiatric symptoms were stable over time, and dropout was unrelated to symptom severity. Mixed-effects regression revealed consistent behavioral effects of depressive symptoms—while controlling for anhedonia—across time points. Specifically, greater depressive severity predicted slower reaction times and reduced acceptance of unfair offers in the ultimatum game. An interaction between depressive and anhedonic symptoms on mood ratings emerged at baseline but did not replicate at follow-up. There were no consistent significant effects of depression on the non-social reversal learning task across time points. These findings highlight the longitudinal stability of depressive symptoms on social decision-making.

Longitudinal stability of the effect of depression on social decision-making

Cognitive science was born in the 1950s with the adoption of the computational/representational theory of mind.  The cognitive revolution enabled empirical progress on foundational issues that had been debated since the time of the Greek philosophers, including new formulations of the rationalist/empiricist debate and new principled distinctions among representational systems.  I sketch the current state of the art, as I see it, concerning distinctions in representational formats between fully implicit vehicles of content and explicit representational vehicles and also between iconic representations and symbolic representations.  I sketch evidence for the proposal that prelinguistic representations, including those in perception those in core knowledge, are fundamentally different in both format and content from linguistic representations.  I sketch evidence for a speculation both ancient and modern in philosophy (e.g. Descartes, Davidson), as well as more recent within cognitive science (e.g., Spelke, Mandler): namely, prelinguisitic representations do not support propositional reasoning.  Innate support for logical thought is part of the human adaptation for language and emerges in ontogenesis in the course of acquiring language.

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Next from CogSci 2025

Heterogeneity in Loss Aversion Estimates across Modeling Approaches

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Multi-task Learning to Enable Location Mention Identification in the Early Hours of a Crisis Event

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