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Suppose humans exist in order to reproduce. Does it follow that an individual who chooses not to reproduce is committing a moral wrong? Past work suggests that, right or wrong, beliefs about species-level purpose are associated with moral condemnation of individuals who choose not to fulfill that purpose. Across two experiments we investigate why. Experiment 1 replicates a causal effect of species-level purpose on moral condemnation. Experiment 2 finds evidence that when a species is believed to exist to perform some action, people infer that the action is good for the species, and that this belief in turn supports moral condemnation of individuals who choose not to perform the action. Together, these findings shed light on how our descriptive understanding can sometimes shape our prescriptive judgments.

CogSci 2021

Why belief in species purpose prompts moral condemnation of individuals who fail to fulfill that purpose

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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

Cognitive science is itself a cognitive activity. Yet, computational cognitive science tools are seldom used to study (limits of) cognitive scientists' thinking. Here, we do so using computational-level modeling and complexity analysis. We present an idealized formal model of a core inference problem faced by cognitive scientists: Given observations of a system's behaviors, infer cognitive processes that could plausibly produce the behavior. We consider variants of this problem at different levels of explanation and prove that at each level, the inference problem is intractable, or even uncomputable. We discuss the implications for cognitive science.

How hard is cognitive science?

Mental imagery is a core topic in cognitive science and central to most perception and action theories. Although mental imagery is often experimentally elicited, a growing body of literature highlights that people differ in their ability to consciously experience mental imagery with some reporting an inability to experience imagery. We examine the relationship between mental imagery vividness and performance on blind reach tasks within a VR environment. The findings indicated that accuracy did not significantly differ based on differences in imagery vividness during a baseline blind reach task. However, participants who reported experiencing more vivid mental imagery and received terminal visual feedback during a recalibration phase demonstrated greater shifts in movement strategy post-recalibration compared to those with less vivid imagery. The results indicate a degree of ‘perceptual learning’ following limited visual feedback that was predicted by vividness of imagery and feedback type. Implications for perception and action theory are discussed.

The Relationship Between Mental Imagery Vividness and Blind Reaching Performance

Hippocampal replay is not a simple recapitulation of recent experience, with awake replay often unrolling in reverse temporal order upon receipt of reward, in a manner dependent on reward magnitude. These findings have led to the proposal that replay serves to update values in accordance with reinforcement learning theories. We argue that there may be a more parsimonious account of these observations involving simple associations between contexts and experiences: During wakefulness, animals associate experiences with the contexts in which they are encoded, in a manner modulated by the salience of each experience. During periods of quiescence, replay emerges when contextual cues trigger a cascade of reactivations driven by the reinstatement of each memory’s encoding context, which in turn facilitates memory consolidation. Our theory unifies numerous replay phenomena, including findings that reinforcement learning models fail to account for.

Hippocampal replay as context-driven memory reactivation

Human memory retains information related to survival more effectively, termed survival processing effect (SPE). Adaptive memory should also more effectively store reliable information than unreliable information. In an experiment (n=107) we asked whether the SPE depends on the reliability of information encoded by linguistic markers. In Turkish, evidentiality markers encode whether information is gathered firsthand (-miş) or not (-di), and provide cues on source reliability. We found that sentences processed for their relevance to survival were better recalled than those processed for their relevance to moving. This survival processing effect was significant for both direct and indirect evidentiality markers, although it was stronger for direct evidentiality. That SPE persisted in the indirect evidentiality condition suggests survival related information is privileged in encoding even when potentially marked as unreliable by linguistic markers. Thus, the effect of language on memory is not profound but rather computed online.

The effect of evidentiality markers on the survival processing effect

How do we manage to understand the minds of others and usefully interact with them? In the last decade, the debate on these issues has developed from unitary to pluralist approaches. According to the latter, we make use of multiple socio-cognitive strategies when predicting, interpretating, and reacting to the behavior of others. This means a departure from the view of mindreading as the main strategy underlying social cognition. In this paper, we address the question of the controversial status of mindreading within such a pluralist framework. Contrary to many other accounts, we ascribe mindreading an equal status in a pluralist framework. Mindreading is required for a variety of central situations in life and importantly underlies the way in which we understand other people. Mindreading is also no less reliable than alternative strategies; reliability is not so much a matter of different competing socio-cognitive strategies, but rather of their complementary use.

The Role of Mindreading in a Pluralist Framework of Social Cognition

Confidence can be experienced for all kinds of decisions – evaluating the value of a piece of artwork, determining whether the lights are flickering, or remembering where we left our keys. These are fundamentally different kinds of decisions, but does that mean the confidence we feel is also fundamentally different for each one? Here, we test competing theories of domain-generality and domain-specificity in metacognitive ability by correlating individual differences in memory and perceptual confidence judgments in childhood. Children performed a recognition memory task and an area discrimination task followed by confidence judgments. Using 4 measures of metacognitive ability (indicated by higher confidence for accurate compared to inaccurate judgments: difference scores, meta-d’, MRatio, and HMeta-d’), we find no significant correlations between this ability in memory and perceptual tasks. These findings support an account of domain-specificity in children’s metacognitive abilities.

Perceptual and Memory Metacognition in Children

A widespread tool in analogy research consists of multiple-choice tests that require identifying a relation between two situations and mapping it to another two situations, to find the correct response option. A key source of difficulty during such tests is attributed to the complexity of mapping. However, most people do not construct mappings purely in the mind, but also compare the emerging mapping with the existing response options, so their features may affect the reasoning process. This study examined the impact of relational match of error options with respect to the correct option (the proportion of correct elements present in a given error option) on the option selection. Results indicate that option selection depends almost linearly on the relational match. Moreover, the higher working memory capacity of the participants, the more relationally matching errors they select. The study suggests careful design of error options in multiple-choice reasoning tests, because the pattern of these options can affect the solution process.

Why people err on multiple-choice analogical reasoning tests

How are emotions understood to relate to other aspects of mental life? Among US adults, concepts of mental life are anchored by a distinction between physiological sensations (BODY), social-emotional abilities (HEART), and perceptual-cognitive capacities (MIND); these conceptual units are in place by 7-9y (Weisman et al., 2017a, 2017b, 2018). Here we reanalyze these datasets to explore the structural relationships among BODY, HEART, and MIND. Across six studies (N=1758), adults’ assessments of the mental lives of robots, beetles, birds, goats, and other entities revealed a clear hierarchical structure: social-emotional abilities were virtually never granted to any entity perceived to lack physiological sensations or perceptual-cognitive abilities. This is consistent with a folk theory—similar to prominent theories in affective science—in which emotions emerge from the combination of more basic capacities for sensation and cognition. Studies of US children (4-9y, N=445) suggest that it takes years for children to acquire this understanding.

Emotions as the product of body and mind: The hierarchical structure of folk concepts of mental life among US adults and children

People from Western and East Asian cultures exhibit systematic differences in perception, attention, and cognition. Why do people from these cultures think differently? According to an influential proposal, psychological differences between Westerners and East Asians reflect, and may derive from, differences between ancient Greek and ancient Chinese philosophies. Here, we critique this proposal in two ways. First, we argue that the way ancient Greek philosophy is represented in the cultural psychology literature is skewed, highlighting differences between ancient Greek and Chinese beliefs, and obscuring similarities. Second, we argue that no causal mechanism has been offered by which ancient philosophies could give rise to modern cross-cultural differences.

Do Ancient Philosophies Help Us Understand Modern Psychologies?

This paper proposes a formalized approach to the specification of experimental tasks in cognitive science. Put briefly, the proposal is to represent the structure of a task by a logic program that accepts only valid experimental event logs for the chosen paradigm. It is argued that the proposed approach stands to benefit the research process at various stages as it involves the creation of executable documentation for experimental tasks, which may facilitate the communication, validation, implementation, and analysis of experimental tasks. A worked example is presented in detail and some potential new directions of research at the intersection of psychology and computer science are discussed.

Why belief in species purpose prompts moral condemnation of individuals who fail to fulfill that purpose

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