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Children can learn words through overhearing (i.e., without being directly addressed, Akhtar et al., 2001). Although research shows that children attend to experimenters when new information is presented in an overheard context (Akhtar, 2005), the role attention plays in retention is understudied. In prior studies, spacing of presentations in time facilitates an effortful retrieval process that strengthens long-term retention of the newly learned word (Vlach et al., 2012). 
The current study examined whether monolingual children retain novel labels for novel shape categories in an overhearing context and the role that attention plays in successful retention. Preliminary results (N = 17) suggest that children regardless of chance performance in the task are showing less attention duration when objects are presented spaced out in time rather than presented in mass succession. This study has implications for how children learn from indirect input and the role attention plays in this unique learning environment.

CogSci 2021

The Role of Attention in Learning through Overheard Speech

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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

Previous research has found that cognitive maps are not consistently oriented towards north as people tend to bias their north-pointing estimates towards nearby roads (Brunyé et al., 2015). While pointing studies are typically conducted within familiar environments, it is not clear whether north-pointing estimates will show a similar bias towards nearby roads when individuals are not physically located in the environment. In essence, a north-pointing task when not located within the environment is a perspective-taking task. In a series of experiments, participants rated their familiarity with the Texas A&M campus and two nearby cities, completed a self-assessment of sense-of-direction, and then pointed towards north. The pointing task used photographs of the A&M campus to provide a location and initial orientation. These experiments provide new insights into individual differences in north pointing and perspective-taking skills when an individual is not physically present within the environment.

Pointing North Online: Using photographs of known environments to evaluate north pointing accuracy

Creativity has been separately related to differences in foraging search styles and semantic memory structure. Here, we converge computational methods to examine the relation of creative foraging styles, semantic memory structure, and creative thinking. A large sample of participants was divided into groups based on their exploration and exploitation strategies in a novel creative foraging game. Their semantic memory networks were estimated and compared, based on an animal category semantic fluency task. We find differential relations between the properties of semantic memory structure and foraging styles and link such differences to performance in a standard creative thinking task. Our results highlight the interaction of semantic memory structure and foraging strategies in creativity.

Creative Foraging: Examining Relations Between Foraging Styles, Semantic Memory Structure, and Creative Thinking

We investigated gesture dynamics by examining wrist-worn accelerometer data from 28 patient-therapist dyads involved in multiple sessions of mentalization-based therapy. We sought to determine if there were long-term correlations in the signals and evaluate the degree of complexity matching between patient and therapist. Moreover, we looked into the relationship between complexity matching and the level of therapeutic success (operationalized by change in mentalization and the severity of symptoms). The results indicated that the patient and therapist gesture dynamics were significantly different than long-term correlations produced by white noise. Further, six patient-therapist dyads matched each other in complexity across sessions, but no systematic relationship between the patient and therapists' was observed and there were no relationships between these dynamics and measures of therapeutic success.

Gesture Dynamics and Therapeutic Success in Patient-Therapist Dyads

A key question individuals face in any social learning environment is when to innovate alone and when to imitate others. Previous simulation results have found that the best performing groups exhibit an intermediate balance, yet it is still largely unknown how individuals collectively negotiate this balance. We use an immersive collective foraging experiment, implemented in the Minecraft game engine, facilitating unprecedented access to spatial trajectories and visual field data. The virtual environment imposes a limited field of view, creating a natural trade-off between allocating visual attention towards individual search or to look towards peers for social imitation. By analyzing foraging patterns, social interactions (visual and spatial), and social influence, we shine new light on how groups collectively adapt to the fluctuating demands of the environment through specialization and selective imitation, rather than homogeneity and indiscriminate copying of others.

Specialization and selective social attention establishes the balance between individual and social learning

Causal inference from observed cases is a central cognitive challenge. There has been some evidence for individual differences in causal learning strategies, but prior work has not examined fine-grained sequences of judgments. In this paper, we report a large-scale model-fitting effort to determine the best-fitting causal inference models for individual participants. We fit a range of different model-types against multiple judgment sequences from each participant, thereby enabling comparisons of learning strategy both between- and within-participant. The model-fitting effort revealed some diversity in learning strategy along both dimensions, though individuals did exhibit some stability. Overall, however, the model fits were worse than expected, particularly when compared to the high accuracy reported for many of the models when used to predict group-level causal judgments. These results thus call into question whether these models might accurately describe the average behavior without accurately describing many (or any) individual’s behaviors.

Individual Differences in Causal Learning

Previous research indicates that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is associated with altered production of co-speech gestures. However, little research has examined whether ASD impacts the processes involved in interpreting observed gestures. We collected meaningfulness ratings and one-word interpretations for 165 video-recorded gestures of varying ambiguity from individuals with and without an ASD diagnosis. The resulting dataset contains insights into gesture processing in individuals with and without ASD, including the number and variability of interpretations assigned to gestures as well as tendencies to endorse ambiguous gestures as meaningful. We also used a subset of these stimuli to identify the neural mechanisms by which gestures enhance memory in neurotypical adults. This collection of videos, as well as the interpretations and ratings from each group, will be made available through the Open Science Framework for use in future research.

Interpretations of meaningful and ambiguous hand gestures from individuals with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Bar charts are common visual tools used to convey statistical
information. Even though bar charts are effective in making
abstract concepts more accessible, poorly-designed bar charts
- whether designed intentionally or unintentionally - can easily
mislead the viewer. For example, a poorly-designed bar
chart may only present part of the effective range on the vertical
axis. This exaggerates the contrast among bars, leading
an unsuspecting graph viewer to wrong conclusions. More
broadly, misrepresentation in data visualization is becoming
an increasing societal problem contributing to daily misinformation.
This paper presents a computational and cognitive solution
to this problem. Our idea is to train viewers by showing
them a few dozen carefully designed bar charts that are misleading,
together with guidance on why these bar charts are
misleading. We then test whether the viewers identify similarly
misleading bar charts in the future. Importantly, we use
neural networks and cognitive models to optimize the training
(i.e., the design of those few dozen bar charts). Our experiment
shows that perceptual trainings can help viewers not be fooled
by similar misleading graphs in the future.

Digitally Training Graph Viewers against Misleading Bar Charts

Numerous disciplines study the nature of social cognition. Also, in philosophy of mind, there are discourses about socio-cognitive abilities, such as joint action, mindreading, and commitment. However, the so-called standard notions require demanding conditions, which leads to the fact that, for example, abilities of young children and non-human animals cannot be captured by this terminology. By introducing minimal notions, a step has been taken to capture a greater variety of phenomena in the field of social cognition. In this way, current empirical findings can be connected to the theoretical work in philosophy. However, when one characterizes minimal and standard notions by a dichotomous interpretation of a two-system approach, quite a few instances are still falling through the conceptual net. This paper will demonstrate how many instances remain neglected and explore the challenges to develop a disjunctive conceptual schema that can capture the varieties of socio-cognitive abilities.

Fifty Shades of Social Cognition. How to Capture the Varieties of Socio-cognitive Abilities?

Research provides evidence that infants infer what others can and cannot see from their differing perspectives, but do infants appreciate that their own perspective on an object can differ from that of a person who views the same object from a different direction? First, infants were shown two faces with screens in front of or behind them. Infants correctly inferred that a face that was visible to them was occluded to a person sitting across from them. Then two experiments presented infants with two unscreened faces: one upright and one inverted. Infants attributed their own perspective on those faces to the other person: They did not appreciate that faces that were upright to them were inverted to the other person. Thus, infants appreciate that others may see things that they do not, but they fail to grasp not that others may experience the same visible objects differently than they do.

Limits to Early Mental State Reasoning: Fourteen- to 15-Month-Old Infants Appreciate Whether Others Can See Objects, But Not Others’ Experiences of Objects

Code-switching is a natural phenomenon in which a speaker alternates between two languages. Although code-switching could be a useful tool for foreign language learning (Bhatti et al., 2018; Macaro, 2005), it is unknown what types of code-switches are potentially most useful. To investigate this, we present an experiment in which we compare learning rate and success of learning vocabulary (nouns) and functional categories (determiners) from input containing two types of switches from English into a Swahili-based artificial language: inserting two adjacent words (e.g., Kiti ro is next to the book) or inserting two distant words (e.g., The kiti is next to book ro). Images help participants deduce word meaning. Recall accuracy over successive cycles is used to provide a measure of learning rate for nouns and determiners, allowing us to gauge the effect of code-switching on learning grammar and lexis independently. Data collection (n ≈ 40 per condition) is ongoing.

The Role of Attention in Learning through Overheard Speech

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Pointing North Online: Using photographs of known environments to evaluate north pointing accuracy

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