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What is the extent to which learned communication signals are a product of biological evolution? Songbirds are a good candidate group for studying this question, since songbird species show remarkable similarities but also a large variability in their vocalizations, with many examples of cultural transmission. To this end, in a large sample of songbird species and other birds that do not learn their songs, we analyzed whether evolutionary relations estimated from molecular genetics can predict acoustic similarity between songs. We assessed birdsong similarity with various acoustic features extracted by signal processing methods. Surprisingly, we found that the extent to which learned songs reflect genetic relations is comparable to - if not exceeding - innate vocalizations. These findings suggest that even in communication signals that are largely determined by cultural transmission (eg: human language), evolutionary constraints could manifest, as famously suggested by Chomsky in his theory of universal grammar.

CogSci 2021

Evolutionary influences in learned bird communication signals

**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.

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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,**
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**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.

This paper studies social interaction in newborns and of various species, whose behavioral developments attributed to the circular sensory motor Stage 3 of behavior development. The article has associated 16 exciting facts of the social behavior in groups of different species, highlighting three questions: (1) how can newborns successfully classify social phenomena that are abstract or absent from their reality; (2) whether emotional contagion can appear through cues of body language that subjects cannot consciously perceive; (3) how do organisms distinguish identical stimuli by their importance (value) without perceptual driver stimuli. The analysis suggests that organisms can interact at initial stages of development by distinguishing cues of a similar modality by their significance (their value). This ability contributes to the assimilation of knowledge about the initial social phenomena. This paper proposes the model of Coherent intelligence, which is strictly based on experimental evidence in modern literature and laws of physics.

Common Origins of Social Interaction of Different Species: The Model of Coherent Intelligence Linking Physics to Social Sciences

Domain-general thought requires an ability to combine information from different cognitive domains within a single judgement. We presented kea parrots (Nestor notabilis) with probabilistic choice tasks that required them to make predictions about which of two hidden samples was most likely to contain a rewarding token. Over the course of three experiments, we found that kea used relative rather than absolute quantities to make their sampling predictions and could integrate either knowledge about a physical barrier or demonstrators’ sampling biases to adjust their judgements. This work provides the first evidence for domain-general statistical inference outside of humans and the great apes. This suggests that at least two structurally distinct brain models have independently evolved an ability to integrate information, highlighting how comparative cognition may inspire the development of novel artificial general intelligence systems.

Kea show three signatures of domain-general inference

Male spotted bowerbirds perform vigorous courtship dances to visiting females on elaborate display arenas. Each arena is built and defended by one dominant male, which commonly tolerates one or more subordinate males. These non-territorial “auxiliary” males are thought to be inexperienced sub-adults. The skills hypothesis suggests that auxiliaries attend established bowers to practice their courtship skills, but little is known about the development of courtship motor performance and which courtship properties are refined with experience. Here we investigate whether auxiliaries are as proficient as bower owners in performing courtship. First, we investigate whether specific courtship moves are used in different contexts within a courtship routine and whether such flexible use of courtship elements is shared both by bower owners and auxiliaries. Second, we examine other fine-scale parameters of courtship dances, in order to further test for possible differences in courtship properties depending on dominance status.

Learning to be attractive: A test of the skills hypothesis in spotted bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus maculatus)

This paper reviews the existing literature on categorical perception of sounds and colors in different animals including humans. We highlight that categorical perception is a combination of nature and nurture; to be specific, categorical perception is innate with a phylogenetic root, but it can also be modified by postnatal experience. We also suggest that language is not wholly the basis for categorical perception, as what Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits; instead, language is one type of experience that can affect the nurture part of categorical perception across domains and modalities in humans.

Categorical Perception as a Combination of Nature and Nurture

The usual approach to studying affordances is in controlled laboratory situations. While recognizing the value of controlled experimentation, I argue for the benefits of additionally considering affordances “in the wild,” i.e., in the context of real-world activity. As an example, I describe ethnographic observation about the introduction of cellphones in rural Uganda in the early 2000s, highlighting the unexpected, innovative uses that emerged in that unique context. This case, I suggest, illustrates the constitutive role of material, sociocultural constraints in the perception and realization of affordances which often go unacknowledged in experimental laboratory research. Theoretically, the case raises questions about the definition of affordances, in particular how narrowly or broadly to conceptualize their spatiotemporal dimensionality. And methodologically, it poses the question of how anthropology can contribute to embodied cognitive science and, more broadly, how experimental and observational approaches can help one another to further our understanding of psychological phenomena.

Affordances in the wild: Anthropological Contributions to Embodied Cognitive Science

Although orangutans are closely related to humans, very little is known about their ontogenetic development. In particular, there is a lack of systematic research on the maternal behaviors that mediate skill development in early infancy. To address this topic, we conducted a longitudinal study in which a Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) mother-infant dyad was systematically observed across 28 months, starting with the infant’s birth. Our data revealed several classes of maternal behavior that potentially influenced infant skill development. The timing of these behaviors was contingent upon infant competence level, as active interventions were intense during periods of skill acquisition. The same behaviors were flexibly deployed independent of whether the infant was in the process of acquiring foraging, locomotor or social skills. Our findings suggest that the maternal behaviors that mediate infant skill development in Sumatran orangutans have features reminiscent of human scaffolding, and raise questions about intentionality in such behaviors.

Maternal behaviors that mediate skill development in Sumatran orangutans

Sensory stimuli can mediate cognition and behavior in different ways. In humans, chemosensory threat cues enhance performance and increase vigilance. In non-human primates, visual, olfactory and even tactile cues of biological contaminants elicit avoidance behaviors, i.e. manifestations of the adaptive system of disgust in humans. Nevertheless, how contaminant sensory cues may affect cognitive processes in non-human primates remains largely unexplored. We tested how visual cues suggesting pathogen presence may affect cognitive performance in chimpanzees. We used disgust-related images displayed at regular intervals during a number ordering task on touch screens. Images of carcasses provoked more errors following their display compared to control and other condition images (i.e. invertebrates and food). Our results support the hypothesis that visual disgust elicitors decrease performance by distracting individuals. Future studies should determine whether cognitive responses evolved differently across threat contexts (fear vs. disgust) given their differences in outcomes (death vs. disease).

Exploring the effects of disgust-related images on cognition in chimpanzees

Humans are ultra-social: they spontaneously incorporate others’ mental states into their action-planning (Kaminski et al.,2008), and altercentric: their behavior is influenced by others’ perspectives, even perspectives irrelevant to their instrumental goal (Kampis & Southgate, 2020). Recent evidence suggests that similarly to human infants, non-human great apes anticipate others’ actions based on their beliefs (Krupenye et al.,2016; Kano et al, 2019); raising the critical question whether altercentrism is uniquely human. 
In two experiments, we tested chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans in a manual search paradigm adapted from Mendes et al. (2008). These experiments replicated findings demonstrating apes’ first-person object-tracking abilities. Experiment 1 found no evidence for altercentrism: apes’ search behavior was not spontaneously modulated by another agent’s beliefs (unlike 14-month-old human infants; Kampis & Kovács, 2020). Experiment 2 found tentative evidence that apes inferred a person’s actions based on her beliefs, and adapted their own actions based on this information.

Great apes’ understanding of others’ beliefs in two manual search tasks

Humans are uniquely impressive cooperators, and yet it remains unclear exactly which cognitive and motivational mechanisms set human cooperation apart. Our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, have also demonstrated a range of prosocial tendencies across experimental and observational contexts. Critically, however, we do not yet know whether their helping behavior, like that of humans, is motivated by an acute sensitivity to others’ needs. We investigated this question in a novel eye-tracking task, with a large sample of captive apes. While their gaze and pupils were tracked, apes viewed controlled videos of an agent reaching toward objects that ultimately would or would not be attainable without help. If apes are acutely sensitive to others’ needs, we predicted that they would show greater pupil dilation (arousal) when the agent could not complete a goal on his own. Our findings shed light on the mechanistic and evolutionary bases of human prosociality and empathy.

Bonobos' (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees' (Pan troglodytes) understanding of, and pupillary responses to, others' needs

It was assumed that the duration of working memory in dogs is around 27 seconds, however, a study on a group of dogs revealed that they were able to maintain spatial memory of an object up to 240 seconds. In our study, we looked at 50 multiple dog breeds. In experiment 1, a small ball was put in one of the 3 wooden boxes in front of the dogs. The dogs had a retention interval for 1,2,3 and 4 minutes consecutively. Then they were asked to search for the ball. In experiment 2, the same ball was put in 3 colourful boxes that were, green, blue, and purple which are distinguishable to dog vision. The retention intervals were kept the same. Our results revealed that the addition of colour has increased the dogs' likelihood of finding the ball which suggests an advancement in the duration of working memory.

Evolutionary influences in learned bird communication signals

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Common Origins of Social Interaction of Different Species: The Model of Coherent Intelligence Linking Physics to Social Sciences

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