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For a gesture to be successful, observers must recognize its communicative purpose. Are communicators sensitive to this problem and do they try to ease their observer’s inferential burden? We propose that people shape their gestures to help observers easily infer that their movements are meant to communicate. Using computational models of recursive goal inference, we show that this hypothesis predicts that gestures ought to reveal that the movement is inconsistent with the space of non-communicative goals in the environment. In two gesture-design experiments, we find that people spontaneously shape communicative movements in response to the distribution of potential instrumental goals, ensuring that the movement can be easily differentiated from instrumental action. Our results show that people are sensitive to the inferential demands that observers face. As a result, people actively work to help ensure that the goal of their communicative movement is understood.

CogSci 2021

I Know You Know I’m Signaling: Novel gestures are designed to guide observers’ inferences about communicative goals

**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.
 
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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.

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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.

Dual-process accounts posit that human learning can occur as a consequence of both associative and propositional processes. This can be contrasted with single process accounts that suggest learning is entirely propositional. In this paper, we offer evidence for both associative and propositional processes using a within-subjects two alternative forced choice discrimination paradigm. Stimuli that varied concurrently along two dimensions were created and each participant’s awareness was directed toward one, facilitating rule induction (i.e., propositional processing) on that dimension. Performance on the other dimension was then used to assess associatively-based performance. We report results that are initially inconsistent with both single process and dual-process accounts of discrimination learning. However, we then show how an associative network, that represents stimuli integrally, can predict the performance shown by participants in the experiment, providing evidence for a dual-process account.

Dual Processes on Dual Dimensions: Associative and Propositionally-Mediated Discrimination and Peak Shift.

Literature on sensory discrimination suggests that it relies on two separate abilities, one related to processing of auditory-temporal stimuli, and the other involved in processing non-temporal visual stimuli. Musical training is associated with structural and functional adaptations in the brain, which improve sensory processing. However, to date the advantage of musicians was particularly evident in the auditory and temporal tasks (as related with perception of music). This study aimed to investigate potential advantages of musicians not only in the ability to discriminate auditory and temporal stimuli, but also with regard to visual discrimination. As many as nine adaptive stimulus discrimination tasks were administered to 56 musicians and 54 non-musicians, with both groups matched on working memory capacity. The musicians displayed better discrimination scores in each modality, including the visual one. The results support the view of modality-independent perceptual benefits resulting from prolonged musical training.

Auditory, temporal, and visual sensory discrimination advantage of musicians

Games have been integral to the development of cognitive science. As experimental tasks, games can provide an ideal environment for studying questions about mental representation, memory, and strategic decision making. Here, we explore the potential of memory matching games as an experimental task by using a simple online version to conceptually replicate two classic effects from the cognitive scientific literature—the picture superiority effect (Paivio & Csapo, 1973) and the word length effect (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975). We manipulate the Item Format of the game pieces (pictures vs. words) and their Label Length (short vs. long). As expected, we find a picture superiority effect. We do not find the predicted word length effect. We argue that the results of the study, along with several practical properties of the task, sup- port the use of the game for cognitive scientific research.

Exploring mental representation with a memory matching game

To cope with the pandemic, we need first to predict it. How does the human brain model epidemic dynamics? In February and March 2020, we conducted an online diary study, where each participant completed 14 days of predictions about the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic in China. Over 400 Chinese adults participated in our study, spanning a total of 40 days. On the group level, we find participants’ predictions of the ending date of the epidemic are correlated with daily new cases. Modeling analysis shows that participants’ predictions agree with a Gaussian process model that generalizes observed case numbers to the future by similarity-based function learning, but deviate from an ideal epidemic model. On the individual level, we find individuals’ pandemic predictions are correlated with their psychological traits or states, such as future time perspective and negative emotions (anxiety, depression, and stress).

Folk theory of epidemics: insights from a 14-day diary study during COVID-19

Psychological theories of actual causation aim to characterize
which of multiple causes of an event is singled out as the pri-
mary cause. We present one such theory called the continu-
ity account of actual causation. The continuity account treats
events as changes of state in continuous time and traces a se-
quence of stage changes backwards through time from an event
to its primary cause. The account is broadly compatible with
the physical process view of causation and we test it by ask-
ing people to identify the primary cause of events occurring in
simple physical systems. An initial experiment confirms that
root causes are more likely to be chosen as primary causes than
are immediate causes. A second experiment demonstrates that
root causes that have temporal continuity with the effect are
preferred even when probability raising accounts would pre-
dict otherwise. The results of both experiments are consistent
with the continuity account, and suggest that inferences about
changes of state in continuous time may underpin an important
class of actual causation judgments.

Temporal Continuity and the Judgment of Actual Causation

Different patterns of lines can express different emotions, but the reason for the metaphor has not been fully revealed. Some studies speculate that this may be caused by the motion implied by lines. In order to verify this speculation, this paper conducts an experiment on the relationship between the emotional expression of lines and the motion of lines. We created 87 different patterns of lines and visualized the motion implied by the lines as dynamic effects. The subjects chose descriptors from a list of 29 emotion words for samples. The results show that the test samples can well cover the classical two-dimensional emotional space and the emotional expression of lines is obviously related to their implied motion. The implied motion, compared with the static version, tends to shift towards the positive and high arousal in the emotional space. In addition, the speed of the motion affects emotional arousal.

Is the emotional mapping of lines caused by the motion they imply?

Humans have a remarkable capacity to make intuitive predictions about physical scenes. Recent studies suggest that this capacity recruits a general-purpose “physics engine” that reliably simulates how scenes will unfold. Here, we complicate this picture by introducing knots to the study of intuitive physics. Three experiments reveal that even basic judgments about knots strain human physical reasoning.
Experiment 1-2 presented photographs of simple knots and asked participants to judge each knot’s relative strength. Strikingly, observers reliably ranked weaker knots as strong and stronger knots as weak. Experiment 3 presented photographs of tangled strings and asked participants whether the tangle forms a knot when pulled. When shown a tangle that would not form a knot when pulled taut, subjects were at or near chance discriminating knots from non-knots. These failures challenge the domain-generality of physical reasoning mechanisms, and perhaps suggest that soft-body phenomena recruit different cognitive processes than rigid-body physics.

Tangled Physics: Knots as a challenge for physical scene understanding

The use of face masks is one of the measures adopted by the general community to stop the transmission of disease during this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This wide use of face masks has indeed been shown to disrupt day-to-day face recognition. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have predisposed impairment in face recognition and are expected to be more vulnerable to this disruption in face recognition. When faces were initially learned unobstructed, we showed that people with higher autistic traits had a lower face recognition performance for masked faces. In contrast, there was a stronger facilitation in subsequent face recognition of masked faces in typically developing adults, but not in adults with ASD, when masked faces were learned first—this face recognition facilitation is predicted by a higher level of empathy. This paper also discusses how autistic traits and empathy influence processing of faces with and without face masks.

I Know You Know I’m Signaling: Novel gestures are designed to guide observers’ inferences about communicative goals

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Dual Processes on Dual Dimensions: Associative and Propositionally-Mediated Discrimination and Peak Shift.

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

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I Know You Know I’m Signaling: Novel gestures are designed to guide observers’ inferences about communicative goals

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Next from CogSci 2021

Dual Processes on Dual Dimensions: Associative and Propositionally-Mediated Discrimination and Peak Shift.

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

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

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