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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&#39; appearance. However, this overall pattern of emphasis did not necessarily improve naive viewers&#39; 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.

CogSci 2021

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

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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,**
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**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/464h1m3iU68" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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.

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.

poster

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

A traditional view of understanding other’s mental states is that early in ontogeny infants start from a me-first position, and through themselves learn to understand others. Here we propose an opposite developmental trajectory, where infants might start out highly altercentric (Southgate, 2020) and through development increasingly rely on their own point of view. 

In a pre-registered cross-sectional study we present 1-6-year-old children with a task where altercentric modulation has been found with 14-month-old infants (Kampis & Kovács, 2020). There, infants tended to search longer in a box when another person believed an object to be present, than when she believed it was empty. We predicted this tendency to decrease with age. Preliminary results with n=191 children included based on their search in baseline trials, show a decrease in altercentric modulation with age (r=-.174, p= .016), which will be discussed together with the relationship between altercentrism and the development of self-concept.

Humans start out altercentric: the ontogenetic development of other-centered cognition

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.

Acquiring the meaning of conditionals

When an otherwise neutral stimulus signals an aversive event, we learn to use that information to avoid negative outcomes. Extended too broadly, however, fear learning can become maladaptive. In concept learning, people tend to restrict generalization to the narrowest category consistent with the learning set (Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007). We tested whether this pattern extends to fear conditioning. Shocks were associated with bananas (basic level group) or with fruit (superordinate group), but never with vegetables (both). In generalization, both groups were shown novel fruits and vegetables (no shocks). Surprisingly, while the basic level group’s Skin Conductance Response (SCR) reliably diminished from acquisition to generalization, the superordinate group’s SCR did not. Further, SCR to vegetables was greater in generalization for the superordinate group, suggesting that superordinate training encourages overgeneralizing threat beyond what concept learning models would predict. These novel findings have implications for both learning models and anxiety disorders (e.g., PTSD).

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