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Explanations of science denial rooted in individual cognition tend to focus on general trait-like factors such as cognitive style, conspiracist ideation or delusional ideation. However, we argue that this focus typically glosses over the concrete, mechanistic elements of belief formation, such as hypothesis generation, data gathering, or hypothesis evaluation. We show, empirically, that such elements predict variance in science denial not accounted for by cognitive style, even after accounting for social factors such as political ideology. We conclude that a cognitive account of science denial would benefit from the study of complex (i.e., open-ended, multi-stage) problem solving that incorporates these mechanistic elements.

CogSci 2021

Studying science denial with a complex problem-solving task

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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,**
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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.

poster

Research has long investigated how knowledge about the world is connected by meaningful, semantic links. Much of this research has focused on a specific type of semantic link known as a taxonomic link, which connects concepts belonging to the same semantic category. However, many inconsistencies have emerged regarding how and when this specific type of semantic link is formed. The goal of the present study was to investigate this contradicting research and provide an explanation for the inconsistent results. To do this, we examined the linguistic environment of stimuli sets from three studies that either supported or did not support protracted taxonomic development. Results provided evidence that the idea that semantic links between members of taxonomic categories in early development may be based on simple co-occurrences in language.

The Mystery of Early Taxonomic Development

Previous research has shown that gestures help people think and solve problems more successfully. Recent studies have also found that encouraging gesture use helps generating new creative ideas and enhances verbal improvisation. Moreover, fluid arm movements have been associated with improving the ability to connect remote associates. Research is still limited with emphasis on divergent thinking and the mechanisms behind the gesture-creativity interplay are not clear. This study examined whether encouraging gesture use could enhance the ability to connect both verbal and visual remote associates of young adults (N = 90) and hypothesised that mental imagery skills could facilitate that relationship. Our preliminary results showed that encouraging gestures did not improve remote association scores, however, mental imagery ability was a significant predictor of verbal remote associates’ scores when gestures were encouraged. We suggest that individuals who have higher mental imagery skills might benefit more from gestures for visualising verbal information.

Does encouraging gesture use help us connect remote associations?: The role of mental imagery

In cognitive psychology, dual-task investigations have indicated that internal language plays a role in a variety of cognitive functions. This preregistered study investigated whether physical endurance as exemplified by cycling performance depends on internal language and internal visual experience. A sample of 50 physically active participants performed 12 cycling trials, each lasting one minute where they were required to cycle as fast as possible while remembering either a sequence of letters and numbers (verbal interference) or locations on a grid (nonverbal interference). We found that participants cycled a shorter distance in the verbal interference condition compared with the no-interference (p < .001) and the visuospatial inference conditions (nonsignificant: p = .10). Further, participants who reported that self-talk usually helps their sports performance were more negatively affected by verbal interference. Our study comprises a first attempt at using the dual-task method to investigate the causal role of self-talk in physical performance.

Mind over Body: Investigating Cognitive Control of Cycling Performance with Dual-Task Interference

While most models of response times have focused on reactive response times, many of the decisions we make involve planning ahead and making anticipatory responses. We present an accumulator model of these anticipatory timing choices, where a decision maker must make a response at a specific time depending on when they expect an event to occur. This model is applied to simple perceptual decisions where participants must determine the trajectory of a stimulus and anticipate its future location. We manipulate the stimulus speed, its travel distance, and the length of time it is occluded, requiring the decision maker to mentally represent its position and motion. Generally, we find that participants anticipatory tend to be much more likely to respond too late than too early. This pattern of results can be accounted for by a Wald accumulator model where the drift, threshold, and non-decision time change with the stimulus manipulations.

A model of timing in simple anticipatory decisions

Anchoring – the tendency for recently seen numbers to affect estimates – is a robust bias affecting expert and novice judgements across many fields. An anchoring task, in which people (N=301) estimated the number of circles in 10 stimulus figures after comparison to an anchoring value, was conducted within a larger study including numerous intelligence, personality, decision style and attention measures. Individual anchoring susceptibility was calculated and compared to potential predictor variables. Two of eight broad ability measures (from Catell-Horn-Carroll intelligence theory) correlated weakly but significantly with anchoring (Gq = 0.16, Gf = 0.12). No decision style or attention measures correlated significantly with anchoring, nor did the Big 5 personality traits, directly. Indirectly, however, as the anchoring task continued and fatigue increased, people relied more on anchors and higher neuroticism may have increased this tendency. Overall, results suggest our ability to predict anchoring is poor and implications of this are discussed.

Does anything predict anchoring bias?

Generic statements, such as “mosquitoes fly” and “mosquitoes carry malaria,” are remarkable in that they are an intuitive and readily understood means of conveying knowledge, and yet their implied prevalence---the specific quantification they convey---can vary widely. This variability may lead to miscommunication, with speakers using generic statements flexibly and listeners rigidly interpreting them as implying near universal prevalence (Cimpian et al., 2010). However, recent research found that listeners with applicable prior knowledge interpret generic statements flexibly (Tessler & Goodman, 2019b). The evident importance of prior knowledge suggests that expertise may impact how people interpret generic statements. We investigated whether experts and novices systematically differ in the way they interpret generic statements, using the esport League of Legends as a cultural microcosm. As hypothesized, experts interpreted generic statements more flexibly than novices did, and novices tended to assume generic statements applied more broadly than experts did.

Experts Interpret Generalizations Differently Than Novices

How do people assign credit for others’ actions? The Correspondence Bias — a classic bias in social psychology — purports that people are predisposed to attribute behaviors to dispositional, rather than situational, factors. However, recent work suggests that the pattern of data cited as evidence of a bias may be a natural consequence of attribution under uncertainty. Here we devise a novel “Bucket-Toss” task in which we can independently and parametrically manipulate and measure situation and disposition pressures to evaluate whether attribution to dispositions and situations are consistent with probabilistic inference. We find that as the strength of the situation or disposition is varied, attributions to the other (unobserved) cause follow roughly symmetric patterns of graded attribution. Together, these results confirm that social attribution appears to be largely consistent with unbiased inference under uncertainty.

Blame the Player and the Game

Moving, mundane, beautiful, troubling, enlightening, sublime—Network Modeling and Latent class analyses of what makes aesthetic experiences unique or universal for humans… and beyond?

Why are birds so smart?

PCIbex is a free web platform for designing and running a wide variety of behavioral experiments online. It provides a simple and accessible, yet versatile code interface for designing experimental tasks, and furthermore makes it possible to share experiment code and resources with a single click, allowing for easy replication. PCIbex comes with an easy-to-learn mini-language, which builds on a standard JavaScript engine. Advanced features include audio- and video-recording as well as an integration of the webgazer eye-tracking API. The workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the basic functionalities, as well as illustrations of advanced features and time for Q&A. While already in fairly wide use in the linguistics community, the tutorial aims to make this resource more widely accessible within the cognitive science community at large.

Studying science denial with a complex problem-solving task

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