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Octopuses challenge many common assumptions and received views about the relationship between the nervous system, cognition, and the mind. Despite the major anatomical and functional differences between the octopus and vertebrate neurocognitive systems—as well as the divergent evolutionary histories of these clades—octopuses have vertebrate-like cognitive and behavioural capacities and even display aspects of putative “mentality” previously thought to be applicable (if at all) only to vertebrates. Octopuses thus raise significant implications for scientific and philosophical studies of the mind, brain, and cognition, e.g., regarding the mechanisms and substrates of cognition, the functions and structure of consciousness, and the implementation of various cognitive routines. Furthermore, the evolutionary and ecological factors that influenced the development of octopus cognition and behaviour warrant a reexamination of presuppositions about how intelligence arises. This presentation provides an overview of some of the implications octopuses raise for cognitive science.

CogSci 2021

The Octopus: Implications for Cognitive Science

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SEB Conference 2026

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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.

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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.

Tetrapod vertebrates evolved acoustic calling to circumvent impediments in communication media. Motor and auditory neural underpinnings of such calling are hundreds of millions of years old. More complex vocalizations, known as display, however, have since convergently evolved in many lineages. I hypothesized that music-like calling might correspond to larger sizes of neural structures corresponding to visual-spatial and motor control capacities, perhaps due to processing overlap. I tested this theory on primates by comparing relative brain component sizes to several spectrographic indexes—song complexity, reappearance diversity [ARDI], and syllable count. Visual and spatial components had moderately positive associations with vocal complexity measures. Areas associated with emotion, arousal, and motivation as well as motor control (especially of head, neck, and eyes) had even stronger associations. Olfaction, however, had negative correlations with all indexes, suggesting an evolutionary trade-off between smell and other brain components during evolution towards signals of greater acoustic complexity.

Primates evolved spectrally complex calls in compensation for reduction in olfactory cognition

Seeking help can be a highly adaptive behavior. From an evolutionary perspective, strategic help-seeking can significantly improve an individual's fitness. However, it has not yet been investigated whether our closest living relatives –chimpanzees– seek help strategically. 

In Study 1, we investigated whether chimpanzees seek help selectively when they need it. Chimpanzees (N=19) sought help when it was necessary, but not if they could solve the problem themselves (Chi2(1)=30.821, p<.001).

In Study 2, we investigated whether chimpanzees seek help strategically: Do they consider action-related costs of potential helpers as much as they consider their own? Chimpanzees (N=14) had a preference for a low-cost option when they had to obtain a reward on their own, but not when they sought help from others (Chi2(1)=7.989, p=.005). 

These findings imply that chimpanzees seek help when they need it, but they do not strategically consider other’s costs when deciding whom to seek help from.

Chimpanzees seek help, but not strategically

Enhanced cognitive ability has been shown to impart fitness advantages to some species by facilitating establishment in new environments. Enhanced cognitive ability may be an adaptation driven during the establishment process in response to new environments or, alternatively, may reflect a species' characteristic. We used an intraspecific-comparative paradigm to examine the cause of a successful mammalian invader and urban dweller, Eastern grey squirrels’ (Sciurus carolinensis) cognitive ability (novel problem solving, motor memory and spatial learning) using well-established tasks. Free-ranging squirrels residing in rural and urban habitats in native environments (US) were compared with their counterparts living in non-native environments (UK). The four groups of squirrels showed comparable performance in most measures, suggesting that the previously reported ‘enhanced’ performance is likely a general characteristic of this species. Despite this, some cognitive abilities such as solving novel problems in grey squirrels has undergone mild variation during the adaptive process in new environments.

Testing the ‘inherent superiority hypothesis’ in behavioural flexibility of grey squirrels.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the base form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which children with DLD have difficulty processing novel inflected verbs in their input. This leads the inflected form to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved by the production of a more accessible alternative with high semantic overlap with the inflected form: in English, the bare form. We test our account computationally by training a nonparametric Bayesian model that infers the productivity of the inflectional suffix (-ed). We systematically vary the number of novel types of inflected verbs in the input to simulate the input as processed by children with and without DLD. Modeling results are consistent with our hypothesis, suggesting that children’s inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes could stem from inferences they make on the basis of impoverished data.

Making Heads or Tails of it: A Competition–Compensation Account of Morphological Deficits in Language Impairment

Collective ritual is virtually omnipresent across past and present human cultures, and analogous behaviors were documented in non-human primates. However, surprisingly little is known about the evolution of ritual in the hominin lineage as well as their underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. Here, we identify similarity, coalitional, and commitment signals as the essential features of collective ritual and argue that these signals evolved to facilitate mutualistic cooperation. We compare evidence for the communicative function of ritual between contemporary hunter-gatherers and non-human primates and discuss the underlying cognitive mechanisms facilitating these signals. Importantly, we will provide experimental evidence from our lab supporting the role of ritual as a platform for cooperative communication. Synthesizing this evidence, we will suggest that between 500 and 300 ka, collective ritual as a repetitively performed communicative act evolved from rudimentary signaling systems to help facilitate mutualistic cooperation and collective action.

Ritualized commitment displays in humans and non-human primates

Vocal learning is considered a crucial component of human language. The ability of vocal learning is rare and among birds has been detected only in songbirds, hummingbirds. and parrots. Parrots are probably the most advanced vocal learners who learn new vocalisations throughout their lives and are known for their ability to imitate human speech. Thus parrots present an intriguing model to shed light on how human language evolved. However, only little is know about how widely vocal learning is distributed in Psitticaformes, an avian order comprising 399 species. In the past decade, surveying behaviour from online video repositories have become a promising research tool to investigate animal behaviour. In this study, we conducted a YouTube survey and provided an overview of the phylogenetic distribution of (allospecific) vocal learning in parrots to enhance our undertstanding of the evolution of language. We discuss why some parrot species are better imitators than others.

Phylogenitic map of vocal learning in parrots

Communication is highly overloaded. Despite this, even young children are good at leveraging context to understand ambiguous signals. We propose a computational account of overloaded signaling from a shared agency perspective which we call the Imagined We for Communication. Under this framework, communication is a way for cooperators to coordinate their perspectives, allowing them to act together to achieve shared goals. We assume agents are rational, utility maximizing cooperators, which puts constraints on how signals can be sent and interpreted. We implement this model in a set of simulations which demonstrate this model’s success under increasing ambiguity as well as increasing layers of reasoning. Our model is capable of improving performance with deeper recursive reasoning; however, it outperforms comparison baselines at even the shallowest level of reasoning, highlighting how shared knowledge and cooperative logic can do much of the heavy-lifting in language.

Modeling Communication to Coordinate Perspectives in Cooperation

Although visual representations are generally beneficial for learners, past research also suggests that often only a subset of learners benefits from visual representations. In this work, we designed and evaluated anticipatory diagrammatic self-explanation, a novel form of instructional scaffolding in which visual representations are used to guide learners’ inference generation as they solve algebra problems in an Intelligent Tutoring System. We conducted a classroom experiment with 84 students in grades 5-8 in the US to investigate the effectiveness of anticipatory diagrammatic self-explanation on algebra performance and learning. The results show that anticipatory diagrammatic self-explanation benefits learners on problem-solving performance and the acquisition of formal problem-solving strategies. These effects mostly did not depend on students’ prior knowledge. We analyze and discuss how performance with the visual representation may have influenced the enhanced problem-solving performance.

Scaffolded Self-explanation with Visual Representations Promotes Efficient Learning in Early Algebra

Human solutions to the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) are surprisingly close to optimal and unexpectedly efficient. We posit that humans solve instances of the TSP by first clustering the points into smaller regions and then solving each cluster as a simpler TSP. Prior research has shown that participants cluster visual stimuli reliably. That is, their clustering and re-clustering of the same stimulus are similar, especially when the stimulus is relatively more clustered. In this study, participants solved the same TSP instances twice. On the second presentation, half of the instances were flipped about the horizontal and vertical axes. Participants solved the TSP reliably, with their two tours of the same instance sharing 77 percent of the same edges on average. In addition, within-participant reliability was higher for more clustered versus more dispersed instances. Our findings are consistent with the proposal that people use clustering strategies to solve the TSP.

The role of clustering in the efficient solution of small Traveling Salesperson Problems

Emotional capabilities of interactive virtual agents grow every year, while most of them lack in emotional intelligence. Their abilities to recognize and express emotions may be worthless, if the agent cannot decide how to behave adequately in a given social context. The central part of the problem, the logic of socially emotional behavior, remains an unsolved challenge. Here this challenge is addressed within a virtual reality paradigm of a poster presenter, designed on the basis of the emotional Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture (eBICA). The framework of eBICA combines the formalisms of semantic maps, moral schemas, mental states and narratives in order to achieve believable, socially acceptable interactive behavior of the presenter bot. The paradigm involves establishment and maintenance of a stable socially emotional contact with mutual empathy and trust. Results of evaluation of the prototype by participants at two international virtual conferences speak in favor of the selected approach.

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Primates evolved spectrally complex calls in compensation for reduction in olfactory cognition

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