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Although subject-complement statements like “girls are as good as boys at math” seem egalitarian, the group in the complement position (boys) is often judged superior. Across two experiments, we examined whether this syntactic framing effect is driven by the ability to discern the pragmatic implications of the syntax. After reading subject-complement statements about the equal math ability of girls and boys or of unstereotyped social groups, participants judged which group was better at math. They also completed a novel measure of pragmatic reasoning ability for subject-complement statements. We found reliable framing effects regardless of stereotype strength, and these effects were uniquely predicted by pragmatic reasoning ability over and above other social-cognitive factors. Moreover, for unstereotyped groups, pragmatic reasoning ability predicted explicit recognition of, and resistance to, the influence of framing. Our findings point to pragmatic reasoning as both a mechanism driving syntactic framing effects and a tool for counteracting them.

CogSci 2021

Pragmatic Reasoning Ability Predicts Syntactic Framing Effects on Social Judgments

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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

Previous research has found that cognitive maps are not consistently oriented towards north as people tend to bias their north-pointing estimates towards nearby roads (Brunyé et al., 2015). While pointing studies are typically conducted within familiar environments, it is not clear whether north-pointing estimates will show a similar bias towards nearby roads when individuals are not physically located in the environment. In essence, a north-pointing task when not located within the environment is a perspective-taking task. In a series of experiments, participants rated their familiarity with the Texas A&M campus and two nearby cities, completed a self-assessment of sense-of-direction, and then pointed towards north. The pointing task used photographs of the A&M campus to provide a location and initial orientation. These experiments provide new insights into individual differences in north pointing and perspective-taking skills when an individual is not physically present within the environment.

Pointing North Online: Using photographs of known environments to evaluate north pointing accuracy

Creativity has been separately related to differences in foraging search styles and semantic memory structure. Here, we converge computational methods to examine the relation of creative foraging styles, semantic memory structure, and creative thinking. A large sample of participants was divided into groups based on their exploration and exploitation strategies in a novel creative foraging game. Their semantic memory networks were estimated and compared, based on an animal category semantic fluency task. We find differential relations between the properties of semantic memory structure and foraging styles and link such differences to performance in a standard creative thinking task. Our results highlight the interaction of semantic memory structure and foraging strategies in creativity.

Creative Foraging: Examining Relations Between Foraging Styles, Semantic Memory Structure, and Creative Thinking

We investigated gesture dynamics by examining wrist-worn accelerometer data from 28 patient-therapist dyads involved in multiple sessions of mentalization-based therapy. We sought to determine if there were long-term correlations in the signals and evaluate the degree of complexity matching between patient and therapist. Moreover, we looked into the relationship between complexity matching and the level of therapeutic success (operationalized by change in mentalization and the severity of symptoms). The results indicated that the patient and therapist gesture dynamics were significantly different than long-term correlations produced by white noise. Further, six patient-therapist dyads matched each other in complexity across sessions, but no systematic relationship between the patient and therapists' was observed and there were no relationships between these dynamics and measures of therapeutic success.

Gesture Dynamics and Therapeutic Success in Patient-Therapist Dyads

While research indicates that people are skilled causal reasoners, systematic deviations from the normative causal Bayesian network model have been observed. These include Markov violations, failures to ‘explain away’, and conservative responding. Different processes have been posited to account for these violations: sampling, associative reasoning, and heuristics. These processes entail effects of response time. To test the relationships between these theories, normative violations, and reasoning time we conducted a causal reasoning study employing time pressure manipulations and response time measurements. Our results show that time pressure decreases overall accuracy. Crucially, we find that time pressure does not affect the magnitude Markov independence violations. This is not what many existing explanations would predict. We find evidence that participants’ responses result from two separate cognitive processes and that time pressure modulates their relative contribution to responses. Hence we provide an explanation of non-normative reasoning patterns based on a mixture of cognitive processes.

Causal reasoning under time pressure: testing theories of systematic non-normative reasoning patterns

Children can learn words through overhearing (i.e., without being directly addressed, Akhtar et al., 2001). Although research shows that children attend to experimenters when new information is presented in an overheard context (Akhtar, 2005), the role attention plays in retention is understudied. In prior studies, spacing of presentations in time facilitates an effortful retrieval process that strengthens long-term retention of the newly learned word (Vlach et al., 2012). 
The current study examined whether monolingual children retain novel labels for novel shape categories in an overhearing context and the role that attention plays in successful retention. Preliminary results (N = 17) suggest that children regardless of chance performance in the task are showing less attention duration when objects are presented spaced out in time rather than presented in mass succession. This study has implications for how children learn from indirect input and the role attention plays in this unique learning environment.

The Role of Attention in Learning through Overheard Speech

According to the theory of common coding, actions are represented in terms of their sensory effects. Hence, performing or anticipating an action biases perception. Previous studies provided evidence for this notion by showing how the perception of ambiguous visual stimuli can be affected by concurrent actions. Here we investigated whether performing a directed action can affect the perception of ambiguous auditory stimuli in a gamified dual-task. In an online study, participants had to avoid obstacles in an endless runner game while classifying the pitch shift in an ambiguous sequence of Shepard tones. Response times indicate interference between both tasks, but pitch shift classifications seem to be unaffected by the motor task. Meanwhile, participants showed a strong compatibility effect between base pitch and pitch shift classifications, in line with a typical SMARC effect. We discuss possible reasons for the absence of perceptual modulations and implications for common coding approaches.

Can Action Bias the Perception of Ambiguous Auditory Stimuli?

Code-switching is a natural phenomenon in which a speaker alternates between two languages. Although code-switching could be a useful tool for foreign language learning (Bhatti et al., 2018; Macaro, 2005), it is unknown what types of code-switches are potentially most useful. To investigate this, we present an experiment in which we compare learning rate and success of learning vocabulary (nouns) and functional categories (determiners) from input containing two types of switches from English into a Swahili-based artificial language: inserting two adjacent words (e.g., Kiti ro is next to the book) or inserting two distant words (e.g., The kiti is next to book ro). Images help participants deduce word meaning. Recall accuracy over successive cycles is used to provide a measure of learning rate for nouns and determiners, allowing us to gauge the effect of code-switching on learning grammar and lexis independently. Data collection (n ≈ 40 per condition) is ongoing.

Learning rate and success as a function of code-switching strategies in the input

People tend to explain events using inherent more than extrinsic factors, a phenomenon known as the inherence bias. This bias is hypothesized to be more pronounced when cognitive resources are scarce. Here, we tested an important prediction of this account: namely, that aging and cognitive impairment should increase the inherence bias in explanation. Participants were shown vignettes of surprising scientific discoveries, and were asked to generate and evaluate explanations for those events. Our results indicate that as age increased, participants were more likely to generate inherent explanations, though age did not lead participants to endorse more inherent explanations when generation was not required. Older adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment generated a similar proportion of inherent explanations as healthy adults on average, though they did not do so increasingly with age. These findings suggest that cognitive deficits due to aging can have downstream effects on how we engage in complex reasoning.

Inherence bias in explanation increases with age and cognitive impairment

Recent models of children’s exploratory play assume, either implicitly or explicitly, that the goal of exploration is to acquire an accurate representation of the world. Under this “play as rational exploration” view, actions are motivated by the value of information or other extrinsically defined rewards; however, this fails to explain the richness and variety observed in children’s play. We propose instead that distinctively human play is often characterized not primarily by the pursuit of external goals but by the creation of new goals. Using a novel free play paradigm, we find that both adults (N=140) and children (N=19, ages 3-8) invent a rich diversity of goals, take costly actions to pursue those goals despite receiving no external reward, and deploy rich planning strategies in the process.

Explore, Exploit, Create: Inventing goals in play

Cross-linguistically, heads tend to be ordered consistently relative to dependents. This tendency is called Cross-Category Harmony. Alternative explanations for harmony include cognitive and non-cognitive processes (e.g., grammaticalization pathways), but evidence disentangling them is still lacking. We report two artificial language learning experiments testing harmony between verb phrases (VP) and adpositional phrases (PP) and between VPs and noun phrases consisting of adjectives and nouns (NP). These two cases are critically different: typological evidence for the former is strong but there is no typological evidence for the latter. Our results parallel the typology; we find a strong preference for harmonic orders between VP and PP regardless whether the participants’ native language has harmonic order (English speakers) or mixed orders (Chinese speakers), but no preference for harmonic order between VP and NP. This suggests that a cognitive bias for harmony may play a role in shaping typology.

Pragmatic Reasoning Ability Predicts Syntactic Framing Effects on Social Judgments

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Pointing North Online: Using photographs of known environments to evaluate north pointing accuracy

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