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Visuospatial cognitive skills are increasingly recognized as critical in many areas of both formal and informal learning, but far less research has looked at their role in the workforce. We know, for example, that strong visuospatial skills in high school are predictive of STEM occupations, but we know less about how these skills are actually deployed in the workplace, and also the extent to which these skills might also be important in various non-STEM occupational pathways. Our review provides current context for these questions, including identifying occupations for which these research questions are actively being explored, as well as areas that urgently call for more research. We argue that systematic and rigorous cognitive research should be used to inform evidence-based best practices for addressing the unique workforce-related challenges of the 21st century.

CogSci 2021

Visuospatial Skills and the Workforce: A Brief Review

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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

Teachers often use drawings of the normal distribution to support explanations of related statistical concepts, assuming that the normal curve provides a common language for such discussions. However, we find that students may not understand the basic features of the normal curve. In Study 1, we showed that students who already have studied the normal distribution in a college-level class do not understand basic concepts associated with it. Then, in Study 2, we investigated whether a brief instructional, narrated video could improve students’ understanding of the normal probability distribution. Specifically, we compared three instructional formats: static slides, a video recording of a hand physically drawing those plots, and a screen recording of the hand-drawing. Despite the brevity of the intervention, we found significant improvements in students’ understanding of the normal probability distribution and related probability concepts. The findings are discussed in relation to the dynamic representation and embodied cognition literature.

Utilizing Dynamic and Embodied Visualization to Facilitate Understanding of Normal Probability Distributions

Not all categories are made the same. Some categories have high within-category variability (e.g., “vehicles” can look very different) and some have low within-category variability (e.g., “apples” are pretty similar). Categories can also vary on their between-category variability where some categories are very similar to each other (e.g., “apples” and “oranges”) and some are very different (e.g., “apples” and “vehicles”). Studies have found that categories with high within and between variability are learned best in massed formats, and categories with low within and between variability are learned best in interleaved formats. However, the unique contribution of each of these kinds of variability (i.e., within and between) have not been studied independently. These studies investigate the unique contribution of within- and between-category variability to 3-year-old children’s word learning in interleaved and massed presentations. The results inform existing understanding of interleaving in word learning and how category variability impacts learning.

Effects on word learning from spacing and category variability

What visualization strategies do people use to communicate abstract knowledge to others? We developed a drawing paradigm to elicit visual explanations about novel machines and obtained detailed annotations of the semantic information conveyed in each drawing. We found that these visual explanations contained: (1) greater emphasis on causally relevant parts of the machine, (2) less emphasis on structural features that were visually salient but causally irrelevant, and (3) more symbols, relative to baseline drawings intended only to communicate the machines' appearance. However, this overall pattern of emphasis did not necessarily improve naive viewers' ability to infer how to operate the machines, nor their ability to identify them, suggesting a potential mismatch between what people believe a visual explanation contains and what may be most useful. Taken together, our findings advance our understanding of how communicative goals constrain visual communication of abstract knowledge across behavioral contexts.

How do the semantic properties of visual explanations guide causal inference?

Selective attention allows adults to preferentially exploit input relevant to their goals. One critical role of selective attention is in adult category learning: adults can simplify the entities they encounter into groups of entities that they can treat as equivalent by focusing on category-relevant attributes, while filtering out category-irrelevant attributes. However, much category learning takes place during development, when selective attention substantially matures. We designed two experiments to disentangle the contributions of the focusing and filtering aspects of selective attention to category learning over development. Experiment 1 provided evidence that learning simple categories was accompanied by selective attention in both four year-old and five year-old children and adults. Experiment 2 further provided evidence that only focusing contributed to selective attention in four year-olds, whereas both focusing and filtering contributed to selective attention in five year-olds and adults. Thus, category learning recruits different aspects of selective attention with development.

Category Learning is Shaped by the Multifaceted Development of Selective Attention

One problem language learners face is extracting word meanings from scenes with many possible referents. Despite the ambiguity of individual situations, a large body of empirical work shows that people are able to learn cross-situationally when a word occurs in different situations. Many computational models of cross-situational word learning have been proposed, yet there is little consensus on the main mechanisms supporting learning, in part due to the profusion of disparate studies and models, and lack of systematic model comparisons across a wide range of studies. This study compares the performance of several extant models on a dataset of 44 experimental conditions and a total of 1,696 participants. Using cross-validation, we fit multiple models representing theories of both
associative learning and hypothesis-testing theories of word learning, find two best-fitting models, and discuss issues of model and mechanism identifiability. Finally, we test the models' ability to generalize to additional experiments, including developmental data.

A large-scale comparison of cross-situational word learning models

Most of the recent success in machine learning has been achieved in supervised learning and predicated on the availability of large amounts of labelled training data. On the other hand, effectively using readily available unlabelled data has proven a much more difficult endeavour. In contrast to algorithms, infants spontaneously learn from the available sensory information without explicit instructions, supervision or feedback. Thus, infant learning can be viewed as a highly successful approach to unsupervised learning. In this work, we explore the parallels between infant learning and recent successes of unsupervised machine learning in the area of contrastive learning. We examine how the principles of infant learning and developmental cognitive neuroscience can inform and inspire the development of novel contrastive learning algorithms. We focus on the phenomenon of category learning and explore how these principles can be applied to better understand and improve contrastive methods.

Can algorithms learn from babies? Exploring how infant learning can inform and inspire unsupervised learning algorithms

Goldwater and Gentner (2015) showed that the sensitivity for causal structures can be promoted with an intervention combining explication of causal models and guided structural alignment of situations from disparate fields with the same underlying causal model. We extended this intervention with inference questions and combined it with a subsequent complex problem-solving (CPS) task, in order to investigate whether enhanced sensitivity for causal structures results in better performance in CPS. This study (N = 108) compares the CPS performance indicators knowledge acquisition and knowledge application among three experimental groups (intervention, intervention extended with inference questions, control group) and reveals the following results: 1) The effectiveness of the intervention in increasing the sensitivity for causal structures was replicated. 2) Sensitivity for causal structures and CPS performance indicators were significantly positively correlated. 3) There is no direct effect of the intervention on CPS performance, but an indirect-only effect via enhanced sensitivity.

Promoting thinking in terms of causal structures: Impact on performance in solving complex problems

Test anxiety affects a sizable proportion of college students, especially in competitive STEM fields. Prior research has proposed interventions aimed at changing students’ implicit beliefs about intelligence (intelligence mindset) to help reduce students’ test anxiety, but results have been mixed and the mechanisms underlying this relationship are unclear. We propose that students’ beliefs about effort regulation may partially mediate the relationship between intelligence mindsets and test anxiety. We tested our model as an exploratory post-hoc analysis in a small sample of introductory physics students reporting psychological threat in a laboratory study. Effort regulation was measured as self-reported judgements of persistence in the face of difficulty and test anxiety was measured on a problem by problem basis during a laboratory physics assessment. Students’ intelligence mindset at pretest was a significant predictor of test anxiety at posttest, and this relationship was mediated by self-reported effort regulation. We discuss potential implications of these findings for mindset-based interventions aimed at reducing test anxiety.

The Relationship Between Intelligence Mindset and Test Anxiety as Mediated by Effort Regulation

Memories of most stimuli in the auditory and other domains are prone to the disruptive interference of intervening events, whereby memory performance continuously declines as the number of intervening events increases. However, melodies in a familiar musical idiom are robust to such interference. We propose that representations of musical structure emerging from syntactic processing may provide partially redundant information that accounts for this robust encoding in memory. The present study employs tonally ambiguous melodies which afford two different syntactic interpretations in the tonal idiom. Crucially, since the melodies are ambiguous, memory across two presentations of the same melody cannot bias whether the interpretation in a second listening will be the same as the first, unless a representation of the first syntactic interpretation is also encoded in memory in addition to sensory information. The melodies were presented in a Memory Task, based on a continuous recognition paradigm, as well as in a Structure Task, where participants reported their syntactic interpretation of each melody following a disambiguating cue. Our results replicate memory-for-melody's robustness to interference, and further establish a predictive relationship between memory performance in the Memory Task and the robustness of syntactic interpretations against the bias introduced by the disambiguating cue in the Structure Task. As a consequence, our results support that a representation based on a disambiguating syntactic parse provides an additional, partially redundant encoding that feeds into memory alongside sensory information. Furthermore, establishing a relationship between memory performance and the formation of structural representations supports the relevance of syntactic relationships towards the experience of music.

Musical syntactic structure improves memory for melody: evidence from the processing of ambiguous melodies

Children acquire conditionals late for reasons that are poorly understood. One possibility is because conditionals have multiple meanings. For instance, the statement “If he goes out without an umbrella, he will get wet” is logically true when he goes out without an umbrella and he gets wet (conjunction), when he goes out with an umbrella and does not get wet (bi-conditional) and when he goes out with an umbrella and (still) gets wet (conditional). Here, we employ a new paradigm to test these interpretations in young children. Eighty 3-6-year-olds were asked to match an if-then statement with one of two pictures: 1 depicting a scenario where the conditional is false vs. one of the 3 scenarios where the conditional is true. Results show that children had a conjunctive interpretation since age 3 but the development of the other two interpretations is protracted until after age 5, with great inter-subject variation.

Visuospatial Skills and the Workforce: A Brief Review

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Utilizing Dynamic and Embodied Visualization to Facilitate Understanding of Normal Probability Distributions

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The Relationship Between Intelligence Mindset and Test Anxiety as Mediated by Effort Regulation

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