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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.

CogSci 2021

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

**31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication**
 This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.
 
 The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, ethics and policies, interaction-based robot design and other topics related to human-robot interaction are welcome.
 
 **CONFERENCE THEME:**
 Social, asocial, and antisocial robots
 
 Robots are starting to populate our lives: at work, in our homes, hotels, shops. However, not everybody is comfortable with robots finding a place in society. For example, people may be afraid that robots will replace humans in their jobs. This belief is exacerbated by the media that, on one side, raise expectations of robots’ capabilities, while amplifying fears and worries on the other side.
 
 In the next years, due to the increasing request for interaction with people in social environments, academic research and market analyses predict that robots will become more and more “social”. But, at the same time, robots may incur the risk of being perceived as “asocial” as their pervasiveness in everyday environments may become an obstacle to social interaction between humans. Or they may even be rejected as “antisocial” if researchers do not take care to develop robots that behave according to the customs and habits of the communities where they are expected to operate.
 
 To prevent this from happening, robotic researchers can no longer take the luxury of being mere technicians. They must be capable of addressing all the challenges raised by future robot-populated communities in a multidisciplinary way. They need to share their knowledge with the public to make people aware of what robots really are, what expectations we can have from them, the risks we may incur, and the possible mitigation plans.
 
 While being open to any kind of contribution related to Human-Robot Interactive Communication, the RO-MAN 2022 conference will emphasize these aspects of robotic research. How can we create robots capable of being welcomed as our assistants and companions in society while, at the same time, not being perceived as “asocial” or “antisocial?” How can we create robots perceived as facilitators of the natural development of human beings and communities, rather than obstacles?
 
 Contributions from different disciplines, not exclusively related to technological development, will be welcomed as crucial to pave the way to global acceptance of future robots with an informed attitude.
 
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31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication
This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.

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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! 

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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.

This paper explores previous arguments that language 
evolved not from animal communication, as naturally 
assumed by most scholars, but instead out of animal 
cognition. It is proposed here that additional support for this 
argument comes from Cognitive Linguistics, an
interdisciplinary branch of linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics
mediates communication and cognition but, as with Cognitive 
Discourse Analysis, studies language use in terms of what it 
demonstrates about underlying cognitive processes and 
concepts. The paper demonstrates key examples of animal 
cognition’s links to language, with Cognitive Linguistics 
support, as well as the approach’s application to animal 
cognition in terms of domain-general symbolism, beyond 
verbal language. However, because communication remains a 
major function of language, the communicative aspect ought 
to be maintained in the explanation of language evolution.

Cognitive Linguistics Support for the Evolution of Language from Animal Cognition

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

Effective social co-ordination benefits from mentally representing a partner’s actions. Chimpanzees can successfully work together, but the cognitive mechanisms they employ to aid social co-ordination remain unclear. Studies of action planning show that, like humans, chimpanzees demonstrate the end-state-comfort effect; considering the end of an action sequence during motor-planning, e.g. using an initially awkward grasp when handling an overturned glass to facilitate how it will end up being held. Human research shows that we extend this to a partner; we pass objects in a way that facilitates the action to be performed with them. Here, we assessed the location in which chimpanzees passed a tool to an experimenter to investigate action accommodation. We manipulated experimenter hand location and their ease of access to locations and found some effect on passing behaviour indicating that, under certain conditions, chimpanzees consider a partner’s actions when planning their own actions in a co-ordination context.

Do chimpanzees represent the actions of a co-ordination partner?

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

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

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, capacities, or mental states to non-human animals. Numerous factors likely affect our tendency to anthropomorphise (TA). Previous studies, using questionnaire methods found increased TA with phylogenetic distance to other species, while empathy and compassion decreased. We used covert focal observations, typically used to quantify animal behavior, to collect visitor comments at primate enclosures in two European Zoos (Vienna, Nuremberg). We quantified TA as the relative frequency of anthropomorphic vs. non-anthropomorphic comments. We additionally collected questionnaire data to investigate how average perceived resemblance to humans and species aesthetic appeal mediate the relatedness effect on TA. Following our hypotheses, we expect TA to correlate negatively with phylogenetic distance, and positively with increased resemblance and aesthetic perception independently of phylogenetic distance. Using a novel approach, this study provides new insights into human perception of and emotional connection to non-human primates.

Primates watching primates watching primates: Why do we anthropomorphise?

The flexible control of sequential behavior is a fundamental aspect of speech, enabling endless reordering of a limited set of learned vocal elements (syllables or words). Songbirds are phylogenetically distant from humans but share both the capacity for vocal learning and neural circuitry for vocal control that includes direct pallial-brainstem projections. Based on these similarities, we hypothesized that songbirds might likewise be able to learn flexible, moment-by-moment control over vocalizations. Here, we demonstrate that Bengalese finches (Lonchura striata domestica), which sing variable syllable sequences, can learn to rapidly modify the probability of specific sequences (e.g. ‘ab-c’ versus ‘ab-d’) in response to arbitrary visual cues. Moreover, once learned, this modulation of sequencing occurs immediately following changes in contextual cues and persists without external reinforcement. Our findings reveal a capacity in songbirds for learned contextual control over syllable sequencing that parallels human cognitive control over syllable sequencing in speech.

Songbirds can learn flexible contextual control over syllable sequencing

Among primates, humans are special in their ability to create and manipulate highly elaborate structures of language, mathematics or music. We show that this sensitivity is present in a much simpler domain: the visual perception of geometric shapes. We asked human subjects to detect an intruder shape among six quadrilaterals. Although the intruder was defined by an identical amount of displacement of a single vertex, the results revealed a geometric regularity effect: detection was considerably easier with most regular shapes. This effect was replicated in several tasks and in both uneducated adults and preschoolers. Baboons, however, showed no such geometric regularity effect even after extensive training. Baboon behavior was captured by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but a symbolic model was needed to fit human behavior. Our results indicate that the human propensity for symbolic abstraction permeates even elementary shape perception and they suggest a new putative signature of human singularity.

Sensitivity to geometric shape regularity in humans and baboons: A putative signature of human singularity

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

Species such as humans rely on their excellent visual abilities to perceive and navigate the world. Dogs have co-habited with humans for millennia, yet we know little about how they gather and use visual information to guide decision-making. Across five experiments, we presented pet dogs (N=49) with two foods of unequal value in a 2-alternative choice task, and measured whether dogs showed preferential gazing, and whether visual attention patterns were associated with item choice. Overall, dogs looked significantly longer at the preferred (high value) food over the low value alternative. There was also evidence of item-dependent predictive gaze—dogs looked proportionally longer at the item they subsequently chose. Surprisingly, dogs’ choice behavior was only slightly above chance, despite visual discrimination. These results suggest that dogs use visual information in the environment to inform their choice behavior, but that other factors may also contribute to their decision-making.

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

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