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Finding adequate representations is an important challenge in solving complex problems. Especially in unfamiliar task domains, initially chosen representations might not cover all of its relevant aspects. I am presenting a theory of representational change based on results from a case study of dyadic problem solving using a spatial transformation task of gradually increasing complexity. This theory proposes that change is driven by expressive limitations of the representational substrates in question. Iconic representations, such as gestures are useful in representing simple objects, but full resemblance soon encounters limits. Metonymic gestures, iconically resembling parts of an object but referring to the whole can extend this scope. By omitting aspects of the problem domain, those partial resemblences can then feed into memory retrieval processes for metaphors bearing no actual similarity to domain objects but to, for instance, such metonymic gestures. Finally, elaborating on such metaphors can open up further representational possibilities.

CogSci 2021

On the Gradual Construction of Complex Abstract Representations in Spatial Problem Solving

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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://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/underline.prod/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

Reputation is a key component in social interactions of group-living animals. Considering dogs’ dependence on humans, it may benefit them to form reputations of humans to choose an appropriate partner with whom to associate. It is also unknown whether this ability is an effect of domestication or inherited from their ancestor, wolves. This study investigates whether dogs and wolves can form reputations of humans through indirect and/or direct experience in a begging situation.

7 wolves and 6 dogs participated in an experiment that comprised three parts: baseline, observation, and testing. In the observation phase, the subject saw a dog interact with two people – one generous and one selfish. The observer could then choose which person to approach in the test. The subjects were also tested after direct experience with the two people.

Preliminary results suggest that dogs and wolves cannot form reputations of humans through indirect or limited direct experience.

Investigating indirect and direct reputation formation in dogs and wolves

Impaired face recognition for certain face categories is known in both humans and non-human primates. A previous study found that chimpanzees are worse at discriminating infant faces than adult faces. Chimpanzee infant faces are different from adult faces in color and shape. However, it remains unclear whether impaired face discrimination for infant faces is solely due to facial color or shape, or due to a combination of both. We investigated which facial features have greater effects on the difficulty of face identification. Adult chimpanzees were required to match the faces in a matching-to-sample task with four types of face stimuli whose shape and color are manipulated independently. We found that chimpanzees’ performance decreased when asked to match the faces with infant coloration regardless of the shape. This study is the first to demonstrate the impairment effect of infantile coloration on face recognition in non-human primates.

Impairment effect of infantile coloration on face discrimination in chimpanzees

Strategic decision-making is chiefly studied in behavioral economics using multi-agent games. Decades of empirical research has revealed that emotions play a crucial role in strategic decision-making, calling into question the “emotionless” homo economicus. In this work, we present a unified process-level account of a broad range of empirical findings on the effect of emotions in Prisoner’s Dilemma and Ultimatum games—the two most studied games in behavioral sciences. Under the empirically well-supported assumption that emotions modulate loss aversion, we show that Nobandegani et al.’s (2018) sample-based expected utility model can account for the effect of emotions on: (i) cooperation rate in Prisoner’s Dilemma, and (ii) the rejection rate of unfair offers in the Ultimatum game. We conclude by discussing the implications of our work for emotion research, and for developing a unified process-level account of the role of emotions in strategic decision-making.

Emotions in Games: Toward a Unified Process-Level Account

In humans, out-of-sight events and objects can be referred through language. Such referentiality serves a function to convey information that could be used when we face the referents afterwards. However, it is unclear whether the comprehension of those information’s referentiality is shared in non-linguistic animals. To address this, we explored whether chimpanzees would utilize video information when they face its referent in another room later. They first watched a food-hiding event (food being hidden into either a green or red cup) through video in one room. They, then, moved to the next room and received a choice test to locate the food. Two out of five chimpanzees performed better than expected by chance. This suggests that like humans, chimpanzees can utilize referential information across time and space between the two rooms, at least based on correspondence between objects in video and those in real.

Chimpanzees utilize video information when facing its referent later in another room

The Go/No-Go paradigm is being used in various clinical applications frequently. Besides, the sequential sampling models have achieved much attention for modeling the underlying processes of decision making. One of the most successful sequential sampling models that is used also for modeling the Go/No-Go paradigm is the drift diffusion model (DDM). The major assumption of the drift diffusion model is that the process of information accumulation is terminated by reaching the boundaries. But this assumption has been argued during the last years and some studies have confirmed that the accumulation process continues after making a decision (i.e. accumulator reaches the boundaries). The main constraint of the drift diffusion model for modeling the Go/No-Go paradigm is that it can not capture the ongoing information accumulation after making a decision. This is important in the Go/No-Go paradigm because when the participants decide to no-go they should wait until finishing the trial and it is a good time for continuing the information accumulation. In this paper, we are going to develop a variation of the drift diffusion model which is able to capture continuing the information accumulation after making a no-go decision. The developed model is based on substituting the lower boundary with a reflecting boundary. This paper aims to introduce an alternative model for Go/No-Go paradigm and after presenting a theoretical discussion on the model behavior, mean first passage time, and the first passage time distribution of the model, it is compared with the previous DDM model.

Reflected Boundary Drift Diffusion Model: A Double Responding Framework for Go/No-Go Paradigm

Offloading cognition to external stores is practiced ubiquitously in daily life (e.g., counting on fingers, writing lists), yet is a relatively new area of investigation within cognitive science. Previous experiments have assessed the benefits and downfalls, including participants’ lowered memory for offloaded information that is no longer available (Gardony et al., 2013; Sparrow et al., 2011). In addition, when offloading, individuals appear susceptible to manipulations of their external store (Risko et al., 2019). We report a series of experiments investigating how the perceived reliability of an external store affects individuals’ susceptibility to manipulation of that store. Consistent with previous research, results suggest that the majority of participants do not notice an item inserted into their external store. However, once cued to this event, individuals do become more likely to subsequently notice a manipulation of their external store. Implications of this research for our understanding of distributed memory systems will be discussed.

The Perception of Reduced Reliability in an External Store Reduces Vulnerability to its Manipulation.

The present paper reports an experiment testing two views of how reasoners learn and generalize potentially complex causal knowledge. Previous work has focused on reasoners’ ability to learn integration functions that best describe how pre-defined candidate causes combine, potentially interactively, to produce an outcome in a domain. This empirical-function learning view predicts that participants would generalize an acquired integration function based on similarity to stimuli they experienced in the domain. An alternative causal-invariance view recognizes that one’s current representation may not yield invariant/useable causal knowledge –– knowledge that holds true when applied to new circumstances. This view incorporates useable causal knowledge as a goal and deviation from causal invariance as a criterion for knowledge revision. It predicts that participants would re-represent causes such that they do not interact with other causes, even when in participants’ experience all (pre-defined) causes in that domain interact. Our results favor the causal-invariance view.

When and Why Do Reasoners Generalize Causal Integration Functions? Causal Invariance as Generalizable Causal Knowledge

Emotional factors like valence, concreteness, and arousal have been shown to influence lexical processing, in that they exhibit non-neutrality, positivity, and negativity biases, respectively (e.g. Kuperman et al. 2014, J. Exp. Psych.; Pauligk et al. 2019, Scientific Reports). Since even weak cognitive biases can yield strong tendencies on a larger time scale, we investigate diachronic long-term effects of these factors on the reproductive success of English words. We operationalize reproductive success by means of diachronic growth, age-of-acquisition and prevalence of words. By combining emotional norms (Warriner et al. 2013, Beh. Res. Meth.; Kuperman et al. 2012, Beh. Res. Meth.) with historical language data (COHA; controlling for semantic shift), we show that long-term effects of valence and concreteness largely mimic cognitive short-term biases. However, arousal, quite surprisingly, exhibits a clearly positive effect on lexical reproduction. We attribute this reversed effect to (i) interactions among emotional factors and (ii) social effects.

Long-term effects of valence, concreteness, and arousal on lexical reproduction

Territorial behaviour has been widely described across many animal taxa, where the acquisition and defence of territory are critical for the fitness of an individual. Extensive evidence suggests that androgens are involved in the modulation of territorial behaviour in male vertebrates. A short-term increase of androgen following a territorial encounter appears to favour the outcome of a challenge. The “Challenge Hypothesis” outlines the relationship between androgen and social challenges in male vertebrates. Here we tested the challenge hypothesis in the highly territorial poison frog, Allobates femoralis, in its natural habitat by exposing males to simulated territorial intrusions in the form of acoustic playbacks. We quantified repeatedly androgen concentrations of individual males via a non-invasive water-borne sampling approach. Our results show that A. femoralis males exhibited a positive behavioural and androgenic response after being confronted with simulated territorial intrusions, providing support for the Challenge Hypothesis in a territorial frog.

Androgen responsiveness to simulated territorial intrusions in Allobates femoralis males: evidence supporting the challenge hypothesis in a territorial frog

How do we know what others know? Prior work has focused on our early-emerging ability to infer the knowledge of single agents. Yet we often infer others’ knowledge by observing interactions between agents. In particular, the ability to reason about what communicators know can help children identify knowledgeable teachers. The present study investigates whether preschool-aged children infer what communicators know from how their communication influences listeners. Children observed two scenarios where a listener failed to activate a toy before succeeding. In the Effective-Communicator scenario, a speaker spoke nonsense language to a listener after they failed but before they succeeded. In the Ineffective- Communicator scenario, a speaker spoke to a listener before they initially failed. By around age 5, children preferred the one in the Effective- Communicator scenario when asked which speaker knows how the toy works. These results suggest young children can infer communicators’ knowledge solely from the presence of communication and its influence on others.

On the Gradual Construction of Complex Abstract Representations in Spatial Problem Solving

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Investigating indirect and direct reputation formation in dogs and wolves

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