United States

Many models of cognition assume that people can generate independent samples, yet people fail to do so in random generation tasks. One prominent explanation for this behavior is that people use learned schemas. Instead, we propose that deviations from randomness arise from people sampling locally rather than independently. To test these explanations, we teach people one- and two-dimensional arrangements of syllables and ask them to generate random sequences from them. Although our results reproduce characteristic features of human random generation, such as a preference for adjacent items and an avoidance of repetitions, we also find an effect of dimensionality on the patterns people produce. Furthermore, model comparisons revealed that local sampling accounted better for participants&#39; sequences than a schema account. Finally, evaluating the importance of each models&#39; constituents, we show that the local sampling model proposed new states based on its current trajectory, rather than an inhibition-of-return-like principle.

CogSci 2021

Local Sampling with Momentum Accounts for Human Random Sequence Generation

**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.
 
 [![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/af259abe105b3791c498ae1552d75710.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18w73BZPB_JVOgcrcdZDqYpEupwVt4CnU/view?usp=sharing)

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IEEE RO-MAN 2022

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.

Many models of cognition assume that people can generate independent samples, yet people fail to do so in random generation tasks. One prominent explanation for this behavior is that people use learned schemas. Instead, we propose that deviations from randomness arise from people sampling locally rather than independently. To test these explanations, we teach people one- and two-dimensional arrangements of syllables and ask them to generate random sequences from them. Although our results reproduce characteristic features of human random generation, such as a preference for adjacent items and an avoidance of repetitions, we also find an effect of dimensionality on the patterns people produce. Furthermore, model comparisons revealed that local sampling accounted better for participants' sequences than a schema account. Finally, evaluating the importance of each models' constituents, we show that the local sampling model proposed new states based on its current trajectory, rather than an inhibition-of-return-like principle.

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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! 

**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.

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

A critically understudied aspect of team adaptation is the phenomenon of coordination breakdowns (CBs). CBs are characterized by a temporarily diminished ability to function effectively as a team. However, team research currently lacks robust methods for identifying and anticipating when teams transition from functioning effectively to a CB. With the current study, we aim to deepen our understanding of how team coordination dynamics across various interaction modalities reflect CBs and effective teamwork, utilizing a three-pronged research approach. First, we used audiovisual data from four person teams involved in a stressful collaborative game task to manually identify CBs. Second, we applied team coordination dynamics measures to physiological and speech data obtained during the task to computationally identify CBs. Third, the latter output was used as input for transition anticipation methods, generating computationally anticipated CBs. Our findings contribute theoretically and methodologically to the systematic investigation of CBs.

A systematic investigation into team coordination breakdowns

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

We propose an interaction in expectation formation between returns of an investment and the favorability of new information.
Such an interaction can have consequences in trading behavior like leading to the Disposition Effect or differences in the profitability of selling and buying decisions.
We introduce a context sensitive Reinforcement Learning model to capture this effect and validate it in a pre-registered investment experiment.
Using a Bayesian Hierarchical model fitting approach we find the interaction to stem mainly from participants incorporating unfavorable information more strongly when in a gain position and less so when in a loss.
By providing increasing levels of additional information about the price movements we are able to mitigate these effects in a second phase of the experiment.
Speaking for a strong effect of belief formation, very clear information is needed to mitigate the observed averse belief and investment patterns.

The Effect of Investment Position on Belief Formation and Trading Behavior

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.

Pragmatic Reasoning Ability Predicts Syntactic Framing Effects on Social Judgments

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?

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.

Local Sampling with Momentum Accounts for Human Random Sequence Generation

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

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