United States

Cognition constrains and influences human cultural productions, among which are information technologies. Information technologies, because of and through their intensive use, can be expected to reflect human cognition particularly well. Cognitive approaches to information technologies have the potential of informing both cognitive science and historical disciplines. Beyond high ecological validity, we demonstrate the relevance of real-world data in testing and informing theories about how the mind works, through four different case studies and contexts: how we represent the world and space around us (Riggsby), how we represent more abstract -number- concepts (Chrisomalis), how we optimize written characters for our visual system (Miton), and coinage to minimize possible errors (Morin). Discussion and moderation will be assured by Valeria Giardino, a philosopher whose main research topic is reasoning with diagrams and the role of cognitive artifacts in improving thought.

CogSci 2021

The Deep History of Information Technologies: a Cognitive Perspective

**31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication**
 This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.
 
 The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, ethics and policies, interaction-based robot design and other topics related to human-robot interaction are welcome.
 
 **CONFERENCE THEME:**
 Social, asocial, and antisocial robots
 
 Robots are starting to populate our lives: at work, in our homes, hotels, shops. However, not everybody is comfortable with robots finding a place in society. For example, people may be afraid that robots will replace humans in their jobs. This belief is exacerbated by the media that, on one side, raise expectations of robots’ capabilities, while amplifying fears and worries on the other side.
 
 In the next years, due to the increasing request for interaction with people in social environments, academic research and market analyses predict that robots will become more and more “social”. But, at the same time, robots may incur the risk of being perceived as “asocial” as their pervasiveness in everyday environments may become an obstacle to social interaction between humans. Or they may even be rejected as “antisocial” if researchers do not take care to develop robots that behave according to the customs and habits of the communities where they are expected to operate.
 
 To prevent this from happening, robotic researchers can no longer take the luxury of being mere technicians. They must be capable of addressing all the challenges raised by future robot-populated communities in a multidisciplinary way. They need to share their knowledge with the public to make people aware of what robots really are, what expectations we can have from them, the risks we may incur, and the possible mitigation plans.
 
 While being open to any kind of contribution related to Human-Robot Interactive Communication, the RO-MAN 2022 conference will emphasize these aspects of robotic research. How can we create robots capable of being welcomed as our assistants and companions in society while, at the same time, not being perceived as “asocial” or “antisocial?” How can we create robots perceived as facilitators of the natural development of human beings and communities, rather than obstacles?
 
 Contributions from different disciplines, not exclusively related to technological development, will be welcomed as crucial to pave the way to global acceptance of future robots with an informed attitude.
 
 [![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/af259abe105b3791c498ae1552d75710.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18w73BZPB_JVOgcrcdZDqYpEupwVt4CnU/view?usp=sharing)

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IEEE RO-MAN 2022

31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication
This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.

technical paper

### Looking for Cogsci 2023? Please [click here](https://underline.io/events/405/reception) to switch to 2023 edition.


**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! 

**Your Program Chairs,**
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**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.

Linguistic Typology of Motion Events in Visual Narratives

Conscious awareness to the events and stimuli around us is a central part of our everyday experience. Yet, are humans the only species that experiences conscious awareness? Since non-verbal species cannot report their internal states, philosophers and scientists have long debated whether the question of animal consciousness is empirically testable, and it still remains a topic of speculation (Dawkins, 2015; Gutfreund, 2017). In the large spectrum of views, some advocate that consciousness may require complex processes like language, a capacity that is unique to adult humans (Dennett, 1995) or a human-like theory of mind (Carruthers, 1998), which may extend to only a few selected species such as great apes (e.g., Krupenye, Kano, Hirata, Call, & Tomasello, 2016; but see Horschler, MacLean, & Santos, 2020). In contrast, others have used neuroanatomical similarities to argue that a number of species (including some birds and octopuses) are likely to be capable of generating conscious experience (see, for example, the Cambridge declaration on consciousness, 2012). Others argue that non-human animals are conscious on the basis of intelligent behaviors which, at least in humans, seem to coincide with conscious awareness as supporting evidence for animal consciousness. These include behaviors such as planning (Osvath & Osvath, 2008), or metacognition (Hampton, Engelberg, & Brady, 2020; Rosati & Santos, 2016), for review see Boly et al., 2013; Griffin & Speck, 2004. Yet, since many complex human behaviors and high-level functions can be performed outside of conscious awareness (i.e., Hassin, 2013), it is difficult to determine whether non-human animals that display intelligent behaviors are indeed conscious or not (Carruthers, 2018). Furthermore, given the ambiguity and difficulty in disentangling conscious from non-conscious processes in non-verbal species, many consider the question of animal consciousness as far from having been resolved (Dawkins, 2015; Gutfreund, 2017). For many, the gap in evidence needed to unambiguously infer animal consciousness is considered “as wide as ever” (Dawkins, 2012).

Unfolding Conscious Awareness from Non-Conscious Perception in Non-Human Animals

Jörg Cassens, Rebekah Wegener, Lorenz Habenicht, and Julian Blohm discuss the dialogic form of explanations. Explanations are a long established research topic in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from philosophy (van Fraassen, 1980; Achinstein, 1983) over the cognitive sciences and psychology (Lalljee et al., 1983; Keil and Wilson, 2000; Lombrozo, 2006) to computer science in general and artificial intelligence in particular (Schank, 1986; Leake, 1992; Leake (1995); Sørmo et al., 2005). However, while there is compelling research supporting the value, structure and function of explanation, as Edwards et al. (2019) argue, “accounts of explanation typically define explanation (the product) rather than explaining (the process)”. By contrast, we aim at an understanding of explanation as a functional variety of language behaviour that treats explanations as being:



Explanation in Human Thinking

Normative learning theories dictate that we should preferentially attend to informative sources, but only up to the point that our limited learning systems can process their content. Humans, including infants, show this predicted strategic deployment of attention. Here we demonstrate that rhesus monkeys, much like humans, attend to events of moderate surprisingness over both more and less surprising events. They do this in the absence of any specific goal or contingent reward, indicating that the behavioral pattern is spontaneous. We suggest this U-shaped attentional preference represents an evolutionarily preserved strategy for guiding intelligent organisms toward material that is maximally useful for learning.


Macaques preferentially attend to intermediately surprising information

When people act on objects, their goals can depend on the objects’ intrinsic properties and conventional uses (e.g., using forks, not knives, to eat spaghetti), locations (e.g., clearing the table, regardless of what is on it), or both (eating with the fork next to your plate, not your dining partner’s). For adults, objects’ intrinsic properties matter more than their locations in most action contexts. Whereas 5-month-old infants privilege objects’ intrinsic properties in attributing goals to people reaching for objects, 3-month-old infants do not. Do younger infants fail to view reaching as goal-directed, or are they uncertain which properties of objects are relevant in different contexts? Here we show that 3-month-old infants attribute goals to others’ reaching actions when given information that their actions depend on what, not where, an object is. Our findings suggest that 3-month-old infants can learn about others’ object goals, before they reach for objects themselves.

Open-Minded, Not Naïve: Three-Month-Old Infants Encode Objects as the Goals of Other People’s Reaches

Most well-accepted models of cognitive evolution define the modern human mind in terms of an amalgamation of species-specific cognitive mechanisms, many of which are described as adaptive. Likewise, these models often use the rich archaeological record of Homo sapiens to illustrate how ‘uniquely human’ mental abilities gave our species an evolutionary advantage over extinct hominins. Recent evidence from various fields, however, indicates that closely related species, particularly Neanderthals and Denisovans, likely had cognitive capacities very similar to ours, and that several key aspects of ‘modern’ cognition are not exclusive to our lineage. The sum of these data therefore requires a timely revision of human cognitive evolution models. On the one hand, claims of species-specific cognitive mechanisms have been weakened. On the other hand, there are tangible differences among extinct and extant humans that call for an explanation. One way to accommodate these differences is to understand cognition as shaped by sociocultural and environmental factors, and to argue for culture-specific rather than species-specific cognition over the course of human evolution.

Cognitive and Cultural Diversity in Human Evolution

Individuals can learn differently, even in very simple tasks. In an association learning task, participants learned associations between correct keypresses and sets of categorically related images. Following a delay, participants were then tested on the associations in a surprise test. This task has been used to examine the relationship between reinforcement learning and working memory. However, the strategies that individuals use to explore the associations between keypresses and images as well as the opportunity to take advantage of a simple rule based on the structure of the task without having to retrieve the correct response may both impact test performance. Two experiments were conducted to test these hypotheses. Results showed that the performance difference from the end of the learning phase to the testing phase differed significantly between set size conditions in a way that is more consistent with strategic differences than an interaction between working memory and reinforcement learning.

Task strategies mediate the interaction between working memory and other cognitive systems

Artifacts – the objects we own, make, and choose – provide a source of rich social information. Adults use people’s artifacts to judge others’ traits, interests, and social affiliations. Here we show that 4-year-old children (N=32) infer others’ shared interests from their artifacts. When asked who had the same interests as a target character, children chose the character with a conceptually similar object to the target’s – an object used for the same activity – over a character with a perceptually similar object. When asked which person had the same arbitrary property (bedtime, birthday, or middle name), children did not systematically select either character, and most often reported that they did not know. Adults (N=32) made similar inferences, but differed in their tendency to use artifacts to infer friendships. Overall, by age 4, children show a sophisticated ability to make selective, warranted inferences about others’ interests based solely on their artifacts.

The Deep History of Information Technologies: a Cognitive Perspective

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The Deep History of Information Technologies: a Cognitive Perspective

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Linguistic Typology of Motion Events in Visual Narratives

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Motivational Gestures in Robot-Assisted Language Learning: A Study of Cognitive Engagement using EEG Brain Activity

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