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It has long been debated whether aesthetics is something uniquely human. Our ongoing project aims to empirically address comparative aesthetics in a collaboration between psychologists and biologists. Defining aesthetic responses as approach behaviour associated with sensory pleasure and corresponding physiological states, we are exploring whether humans and non-human animals share similar mechanisms in their evaluation of sexually attractive stimuli. Specifically, we compare humans and ring doves (Streptopelia risoria), a species whose courtship behaviour and physiology have been extensively investigated in behavioural and neuroendocrinology research. Both species form pair bonds, communicate using visual and auditory signals, and can be tested in laboratory conditions with conspecifics or using video and auditory stimuli. Truly comparative work involves using as similar an experimental approach as possible for both human and animal participants. Here we report our comparative methods and experimental paradigms, and some recent results.

CogSci 2021

Comparative Aesthetics: A novel approach to investigate multimodal attractiveness in humans and animals

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

**Your Program Chairs,**
![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/99984908caba5e6453e5fc5ba34f3507.jpg)

**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


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.

poster

We use forecasting models for the 2020 US presidential election to test a model of human causal judgment. Across tens of thousands of simulations of possible outcomes of the election, we computed, for each US state, an adjusted measure of the correlation between a democratic victory in that state and a democratic victory at the national level. These scores accurately predicted the extent to which US participants (N=207, pre-registered) viewed victory in a given state as having caused Joe Biden to win the presidency. This supports the theory that people intuitively select as causes of an outcome the factors with the largest average causal effect on that outcome across possible worlds. This is the first evidence that the theory scales to real-world complex settings, and suggests a deep connection between cognitive processes for prediction and causal judgment.

Causal judgment in the wild

As the mental health crisis deepens with the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, there is an increasing need for understanding individuals’ emotional experiences. We have built a large-scale Korean text corpus with five self-labeled psychological ground-truths: empathy, loneliness, stress, personality, and emotions. We collected 19,025 documents of daily emotional experiences from 3,805 Korean residents from October to December 2020. We collected 42,128 sentences with different levels of theory-of-mind. Each sentence was annotated by trained psychology students and reviewed by experts. Participants varied in their ages from the early 20s to late 80s and had various social and economic statuses. The pandemic impacted the majority of daily lives, and participants often reported negative emotional experiences. We found the most frequent topics: responses to confirmed cases, health concerns of family members, anger towards people without masks, stress-relief strategies, change of the lifestyle, and preventive practices. We then trained the Word2Vec model to observe specific words that match each topic from the topic model. The current dataset will serve as benchmark data for large-scale and computational methods for identifying mental health levels based on text. This dataset is expected to be used and transformed in many creative ways to mitigate COVID-19-related mental health problems

Building a Psychological Ground Truth Dataset with Empathy and Theory-of-Mind During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Egocentric space perception is multimodal, closely tied to action and bodily movements and has an inherent phenomenal dimension. One prominent account, provided by Rick Grush, has postulated posterior parietal cortex as key neural area. Computational model based on Kalman filter has been proposed to account for the operation of this brain region, underscoring the importance of bodily skills for perceiving spatial properties.
The current study provides a first direct simulation of this model in a semi-realistic 3D virtual environment. The goal of the simulation was to develop an agent with a realistic ability for egocentric space perception based on a neural approximation of Kalman filter. To achieve this goal, we use machine learning techniques, with a strong focus on unsupervised methods of reinforcement learning.
Resulting agent is tested behaviorally on ecologically plausible tasks to evaluate its internal, learned representations. Poster presents simulation results and discusses the model.

Modeling "spatial purport of perceptual experience": egocentric space perception in a semi-realistic 3D virtual environment

When exposed to perceptual sequences, we are able to gradually identify patterns within and form a compact internal description of the sequence. One proposal of how disparate sequential items can become one is people's ability to form chunks. We study chunking under the regime of serial reaction time tasks. We propose a rational model of chunking that progressively rearranges and modifies its representation to arrive at one that is beneficial to participants' utility under task demands. Our model predicts that participants should, on average, learn longer chunks when optimizing for speed than optimizing for accuracy. We tested this prediction experimentally by instructing and rewarding one group of participants to act as fast as possible, while the other group was instructed to act as accurately as possible. From several independent sources of evidence, we confirmed our model's predictions that participants in the fast condition chunked more than participants in the accurate condition. These results shed new light on the benefits of chunking and pave the way for future studies on structural and representation learning domains.

Chunking as a Rational Solution to the Speed-Accuracy Trade-off in a Serial Reaction Time Task

Reasoning about what other people know is an important cognitive ability, known as epistemic reasoning, which has fascinated psychologists, economists, and logicians. In this paper, we propose a computational model of humans’ epistemic reasoning, including higher-order epistemic reasoning—reasoning about what one person knows about another person’s knowledge—that we test in an experiment using a deductive card game called “Aces and Eights”. Our starting point is the model of perfect higher-order epistemic reasoners given by the framework of dynamic epistemic logic. We modify this idealized model with bounds on the level of feasible epistemic reasoning and stochastic update of a player’s space of possibilities in response to new information. These modifications are crucial for explaining the variation in human performance across different participants and different games in the experiment. Our results demonstrate how research on epistemic logic and cognitive models can inform each other.

Does Amy Know Ben Knows You Know Your Cards? A Computational Model of Higher-Order Epistemic Reasoning

We investigated how the language background (L1) of bilinguals influences the representation and use of the second language (L2) through computational models. With the essays part from The International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE), we compared variables indicating syntactic complexity in their L2 production to predict L1. We then trained neural language models based on BERT to predict the L1 of these English learners. Results showed the systematic influence of L1 syntax properties on English learners' L2 production, which further confirmed integrations of syntactic knowledge across languages in bilingual speakers. Results also found neural models can learn to represent and detect such L1 impacts, while multilingually trained models have no advantage in doing so.

Language representations in L2 learners: Toward neural models

Dogs are not particularly known for complex physical cognitive abilities. However, a number of recent violation-of-expectation studies have challenged this view. In the current eye-tracking study, we further investigated dogs’ (N=15) reaction to physically implausible events, particularly in the context of support, occlusion, and launching events. In Experiment 1, the dogs watched a rolling ball moving over a gap in a surface either falling down or hovering over the gap. In Experiment 2, the dogs saw a ball rolling behind a narrow pole either disappearing behind it or re-appearing on the other side. In Experiment 3, the dogs observed launching events either with or without contact between the balls. The dogs’ pupil dilation response and looking times suggest that they form implicit expectations about occlusion and launching events but not about gravity-related events at least in the context of animated objects on a screen.

Expectancy violations about physical properties of animated objects in dogs

Multimodal signals consist of multiple components in multiple sensory channels and are common in animal courtship. Signal components can carry unique or redundant information about the courting animal. The response to such multimodal displays might additionally reveal multisensory integration such that the response to the whole display is not simply the sum of the responses to the individual parts. In this study, we used high-quality audiovisual recordings of courting male ring doves and measured female behavioural responses to video playback. 21 females were split into three conditions: one featured multimodal, audiovisual playback, while in the other two, either the visual or auditory courtship component was occluded using familiar stimuli (foliage; vacuum cleaner sound). We analysed female behaviours associated with sexual stimulation and compared frequency of behaviours across conditions and between playback and control intervals. Additionally, we measured blood levels of oestradiol before and after testing.

Using playback to investigate multimodal signalling of attractiveness in ring doves (Streptopelia risoria)

People ask questions that are far richer, more informative, and more creative than current AI systems. We propose a neuro-symbolic framework for modeling human question asking, which represents questions as formal programs and generates programs with an encoder-decoder based deep neural network. From extensive experiments using an information-search game, we show that our method can predict which questions humans are likely to ask in unconstrained settings. We also propose a novel grammar-based question generation framework trained with reinforcement learning, which is able to generate creative questions without supervised human data.

Modeling Question Asking Using Neural Program Generation

People learn new categories on a daily basis, and the study of category learning is a major topic of research in cognitive science. However, most prior work has focused on how people learn categories over abstracted, artificial (and usually perceptual) representations. Little is known about how new categories are learnt for natural objects, for which people have extensive prior knowledge. We examine this question in three pre-registered studies involving the learning of new categories for everyday foods. Our models use word vectors derived from large-scale natural language data to proxy mental representations for foods, and apply classical models of categorization over these vectorized representations to predict participant categorization judgments. This approach achieves high predictive accuracy rates, and can be used to identify the real-world settings in which category learning is impaired. In doing so, it shows how existing theories of categorization can be used to predict and improve everyday cognition and behavior.

Comparative Aesthetics: A novel approach to investigate multimodal attractiveness in humans and animals

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