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Elementary schools provide students with their first encounters with formal science, creating both foundations for students’ knowledge of science content, and impressions of what it means to learn science. Here, we examined adult, including K-12 teachers’, intuitions regarding different types of content relevant to elementary school science, namely, labels, function, and mechanism. We focused primarily on perceptions of mechanistic explanations—causal explanations that explain how something works. This focus stems from children’s curiosity and aptitude for mechanism. Across four studies we predicted, and found, that participants deprioritize mechanistic explanations relative to more superficial explanation types: labels and function. This intuition, which appears to be reflected in formal science curricula, misestimates children’s abilities and attitudes towards mechanistic information.

CogSci 2021

Adult Intuitions about Mechanistic Content in Elementary School Science Lessons

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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.

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Preschool children vary in their numerical knowledge, and this variation predicts math achievement throughout elementary school. Can preschool interventions that exercise school-relevant numerical concepts support later school math learning, and if so, what numerical activities should be targeted to best foster this learning? Here we ask whether a game-based intervention targeting preschool children’s understanding of the base-10 compositional system of number words and symbols improves their school-relevant numerical concepts in the short term. Five- to six-year-old children who played a numerical board game at home with their parents for two-three weeks showed improved preschool numerical concepts, compared to children who played a game with similar materials and procedures but no numerical content. This finding takes a first step toward developing and evaluating a suite of game-based interventions, leveraging research in developmental cognitive science both to enhance children’s learning in school and to deepen understanding of how children learn.

Enhancing Preschool Readiness: Evidence from a Home-based Game to Improve 5-year-old Children’s Mastery of Symbolic Numbers and Concepts

Human learning efficiency in reinforcement learning tasks decreases when the number of the presented stimuli increases, a finding known as the "set size effect". From the computational rationality perspective, this effect can be interpreted as the brain’s balancing task performance against rising cognitive costs. Still, it remains unclear how best to quantify cognitive cost in learning tasks. One candidate is policy complexity, defined in terms of information theory as the mutual information between the sensory input and behavioral response. However, using a published data set (Collins & Frank, 2012), we show that policy complexity alone cannot explain the set size effect because the optimal policy complexity does not necessarily increase with the set size. We therefore propose a computational model and conduct a model-based analysis to show the minimal constituents of cognitive cost are policy complexity and representation complexity---the information quantity conveyed from sensory inputs to internal representations.

A computationally rational model of human reinforcment learning

Altering an individual’s identity during virtual tasks, such that it is incongruent with their own identity, can reduce unconscious biases and increase empathy and prosocial behavior. While such virtual embodiment has been investigated for race, age, and socioeconomic status, the question remains whether immersive perspective taking reduces implicit gender bias. Accordingly, we investigated the effect of gendered embodiment on gender bias related to the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and math fields. Undergraduate students (N=65) undertook a simulated virtual interview task, which included the rating and selection of male and female candidates. Females were significantly more empathetic than males. Greater empathy predicted higher candidate ratings, except for competence of the female candidate. Preliminary findings establish foundations for future comparative studies and contribute to elucidating the nature of empathy during and after virtual perspective taking, such that it may have a greater impact on males for modulating gender bias.

Perspective Taking in Virtual Reality: Addressing Gender Bias in STEM

The COVID-19 pandemic and its profound global effects may be changing the way we think about illness. We surveyed 120 American adults to explore the effects of the pandemic on their mental models of illness. Participants read three vignettes: one relating to COVID-19, one to cancer, and another to the common cold, and were asked questions relating to the diagnosis, treatment, prevention, time-course, and transmission of each disease. Results showed that participants were more likely to correctly diagnose COVID-19 (93% accuracy) compared to a cold (60% accuracy) or cancer (51% accuracy). Of the 40 participants that incorrectly diagnosed the cold vignette, 7 misdiagnosed a cold as COVID-19. These and other preliminary findings suggest a distinct mental model for COVID-19 compared to other illnesses. The prevalence of COVID-19 in everyday discourse may lead to biased responding, similar to errors in medical diagnosis that result from physicians’ expertise (Hashem et al., 2003).

Mental Models of Illness in the COVID-19 Era

Relational reasoning is an important component of abstract thought that emerges early in development but shows substantial variation across contexts, with children in the US and China following distinct developmental trajectories in one paradigm between 18m and 4y. To understand the mechanisms through which variation in the learning environment influences the development of relational reasoning, we examine early relational reasoning in Punjabi speakers in India, who share some cultural and linguistic elements of their experience with children in both the US and China. In a causal relational match-to-sample task, we find that 3-year-olds in India exhibit performance that is intermediate to their high-performing peers in China and the relatively poor performance observed in the US at this age. These results suggest complexity and variability in the development of relational reasoning and lay a foundation for future research designed to tease apart the factors associated with early diversity in relational reasoning.

Characterizing the development of relational reasoning in India

Novel word disambiguation via mutual exclusivity is the tendency to discard familiar objects as referents of novel words. While mutual-exclusivity inferences have been widely documented in toddlers beyond 18 months of age, studies typically failed to show it in younger infants. Recently, Pomiechowska, Brody, Csibra, and Gliga (2021) showed that 12-month-old infants can use mutual exclusivity, but only if familiar objects are targeted by non-verbal communication (i.e., pointing) prior to labeling. This arguably triggers infants to represent these objects under a conceptual description, a representational format that is necessary for mutual exclusivity inferences but is not spontaneously generated in young infants. The present study is a direct online replication of the task used by Pomiechowska et al. with a wider age range (12-15 months) and adapted for Zoom-based testing.

Mutual exclusivity inferences in 12-to-15-month-olds: an online looking-while-listening study

The recent pandemic has emphasized the need for developing more effective pedagogical practices in online education. While activities that require more deep connection of concepts can enhance overall learning versus mere rote rehearsal, are conceptual activities also viable options for inclusion in online coursework, given the asynchronous and flexible nature of online learning? To answer this question, students in 2 online courses either completed concept-mapping exercises, or control exercises (i.e., definitions of concepts). Results indicate that while initially concept-mapping is no better than memorization, as experience with mapping increases, a growth in learning emerges later in the course. Students also rate the educational utility and enjoyablity of conceptual activities similarly to control exercises, suggesting that students do not perceive these conceptual activities more negatively. As such, concept-mapping does have a utility for online learning, but there is a necessary a warm-up period before benefits are realized.

Concept mapping produces delayed benefits in online learning.

As adults, we do not only choose what we prefer, but we also tend to adapt our preferences post-hoc to fit our previous choices, even when these were blind. This is thought to result from cognitive dissonance as an effort to reconcile our choices and preferences. It has been argued to rely on the self-concept, but has also been found in preschoolers and monkeys.
In a preregistered study, we therefore investigated when blind choice-induced preferences emerge and whether they are related to self-concept development in the second year of life. Results in N=200 children aged 16-36 months provide strong evidence that blind-choice induced preferences develop between 1 and 2 years (BF10=12.5). Two-year-olds avoided an object that they had previously discarded in a blind choice, whereas 1-year-olds did not show any such preferences yet. Further, we found substantial evidence against a relation with measures of self-concept development (BF10=0.2).

Does cognitive dissonance depend on self-concept? 2-year-old children, but not 1-year-olds, show blind choice-induced preferences

Though humans should defer to the superior judgement of AI in an increasing number of domains, certain biases prevent us from doing so. Understanding when and how these biases occur is a central challenge for human-computer interaction. A proposed source of such bias is the perceived subjectivity of tasks. We tested this hypothesis using one of the most subjective tasks possible: Evaluating joke funniness. Across two experiments, we addressed the following: Would people rate jokes as less funny if they believed an AI created them? When asked to rate jokes and guess their likeliest source, participants evaluated jokes attributed to humans as the funniest and those to AI as the least funny. However, when we explicitly framed these same jokes as either human or AI-created, there was no difference in performance-level ratings. These results challenge the notion that task subjectivity always biases users against AI if the source is transparent.

The Funny Thing About Algorithm Aversion: Investigating Bias Toward AI Humor

We explore the link between children’s gesture production and analogical reasoning. Specifically, we ask whether children who spontaneously gesture when completing a retelling task are more likely to engage in analogical transfer, compared to those who do not gesture. To test this, 85 5-7-year-olds listened to three superficially distinct stories that shared a common abstract problem and solution. After each of the first two exemplar stories, participants were asked to retell the story events to a naïve listener and their speech and spontaneous gesture(s) were coded. For the third story, participants were asked to generate the analogous solution themselves. Results indicate a significant relationship between children’s analogical transfer and gesture production. This preliminary study suggests that children’s spontaneous gestures may provide a window into their analogical processing. We discuss future directions aimed at further examining the mechanism underlying this relationship.

Adult Intuitions about Mechanistic Content in Elementary School Science Lessons

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Enhancing Preschool Readiness: Evidence from a Home-based Game to Improve 5-year-old Children’s Mastery of Symbolic Numbers and Concepts

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