United States

A growing toolbox is emerging for linking neuroimaging data to computations supporting human cognition. In representational similarity analysis (RSA), for example, activity patterns over voxels are compared in response to similar vs. dissimilar stimuli. Resulting similarity matrices are compared to similarity matrices based on theoretical principles or computational models. Similarly, complex EEG or MEG time series can be compared to information-theoretic variables, such as stimulus entropy or surprisal, allowing inferences about the sensitivity of neural responses to aspects of signal information over time. A challenge is determining to what degree such analyses can identify hallmarks of specific computations rather than computationally non-specific resonance with inputs. Here, we apply RSA and information-theoretic analyses to one well-characterized model: TRACE. We consider whether these analyses identify known principles underlying TRACE, and whether TRACE exhibits sensitivity to information-theoretic variables similar to that observed in human brains.

CogSci 2021

Discovering computational principles in models and brains

**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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### Looking for Cogsci 2023? Please [click here](https://underline.io/events/405/reception) to switch to 2023 edition.


**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.

Frequency counters are computational mechanisms that track the frequency or probability of speech units. Such counters are idealizations which re-describe frequency effects in early word segmentation, not providing an underlying learning mechanism from which these effects arise. Previous work has shown that Implicit Chunking represents a plausible learning mechanism explaining infants’ sensitivity to statistical cues when segmenting small-scale artificial languages (French et al., 2011). However, no work has examined whether Implicit Chunking allows to segment naturalistic speech in a developmentally plausible way. Here, we show how a novel symbolic model of Implicit Chunking – CLASSIC-Utterance-Boundary - performs better or as well as previous frequency-based models (i.e., transitional probability, chunking) at predicting children’s word age of first production and a range of word-level characteristics of children’s vocabularies (word frequency, word length, neighborhood density, phonotactic probability). We suggest that explicit frequency counters are not necessary to explain infants’ speech segmentation in naturalistic settings.

Are Explicit Frequency Counters Necessary in Computational Models of Early Word Segmentation?

Signalling systems of various species (humans and non-human animals) as well as our world both exhibit discrete and continuous properties. However, continuous meanings are not always expressed using continuous forms but instead frequently categorised into discrete symbols. While discrete symbols are ubiquitous in communication, the emergence of discretisation from a continuous form space is not well understood. We investigate the emergence of discrete symbols by simulating the learning process of two agents that acquire a shared signalling system. The task is formalised as a reinforcement learning problem in continuous form and meaning space. We identify two central causes for the emergence of discretisation: 1) sub-optimal signalling conventions and 2) a topological mismatch between form and meaning space. A long version of this paper has been accepted for publication in Cognition (International Journal of Cognitive Science).

Discretisation and Continuity: Simulating the Emergence of Symbols in Communication Games

People have the fascinating ability to infer causality by observing other humans’ actions. We modelled this process using a Bayesian rational agent model and showed how people can reason about another agent’s beliefs and, by extension, infer the world’s causal structure. We compared the model’s predictions against humans’ causal judgements on a novel inference task. Participants (N = 171) were shown a dynamic scene depicting either a human agent, robot agent, or both agents acting on two objects sequentially before observing an outcome. After observing the human (vs the less intentional robot) agent, people were more likely to infer that both objects (in sequential order) caused the outcome. When two agents of different intentionality were shown, people favored the object that the intentional agent interacted with as the cause of the outcome. Our model captured these inference patterns well and revealed insights into reasoning about semi-intentional agents and multi-agent contexts.

Learning from Agentic Actions: Modelling Causal Inference from Intention

We test whether people are able to reason based on incidentally acquired probabilistic and context-specific magnitude information. We manipulated variance of values drawn from two normal distributions as participants perform an unrelated counting task. Our results show that people do learn category-specific information incidentally, and that the pattern of their judgments is broadly consistent with normative Bayesian reasoning at the cohort level, but with large individual-level variability. We find that this variability is explained well by a frugal memory sampling approximation; observer models making this assumption explain approximately 70% of the variation in participants' responses. We also find that behavior while judging easily discriminable categories is consistent with a model observer drawing fewer samples from memory, while behavior while judging less discriminable categories is better fit by models drawing more samples from memory. Thus, our model-based analysis additionally reveals resource-rationality in memory sampling.

One and known: Incidental probability judgments from very few samples

A fundamental goal in cognitive and historical linguistic research on semantic change is to characterize the regularity in how word meanings change over time. We examine a common belief that has not yet been evaluated comprehensively, which asserts that gender of a word influences its direction of semantic change. By this account, female terms like mistress should undergo pejorative change in meaning systematically more so than male terms like master. We evaluate this claim in gender-marked word pairs in English and French respectively as languages without and with grammatical gender. Our results provide supporting evidence for gender asymmetry in semantic change of English words but not French words. Our study raises questions about the generality of the claim about gender asymmetry in semantic change and provides a scalable computational framework for understanding the social roots of word meaning change.

A computational evaluation of gender asymmetry in semantic change

Cognates – words which share form and meaning across two languages – have been extensively studied to understand the bilingual mental lexicon. One consistent finding is that bilingual speakers process cognates faster than non-cognates, an effect known as cognate facilitation. Yet, there is no agreement on the underlying factors driving this effect. In this paper, we use computational modeling to test whether the effect can be explained by the cumulative frequency hypothesis. We train a computational language model on two language pairs (Dutch–English, Norwegian–English) under different conditions of input presentation and test it on sentence stimuli from two existing studies with bilingual speakers of those languages. We find that our model can exhibit a cognate effect, lending support to the cumulative frequency hypothesis. Further analyses reveal that the size of the effect in the model depends on its linguistic accuracy. We interpret our results within the literature on cognate processing.

Cumulative frequency can explain cognate facilitation in language models

Moral disengagement is a mechanism whereby people distance or disconnect their actions from their moral evaluation. This work presents a novel knowledge graph schema, dataset, and transformer-based NLP model to identify and represent indicators of moral disengagement in text. Our graph schema is informed by Albert Bandura’s psychosocial mechanisms of moral disengagement, including dehumanization, victimization, moral condemnation and justification, and attribution (or displacement) of responsibility. Our preliminary dataset is comprised of online posts from five different communities. We present initial evidence that (1) our theory-based schema can represent moral disengagement indicators across these communities and (2) our transformer-based NLP model can identify indicators of moral disengagement in text. As it matures, this thread of computational social science research can help us understand the spread of morally-disengaged language and its effect on online communities.

Toward Transformer-Based NLP for Extracting Psychosocial Indicators of Moral Disengagement

Defying polarization, U.S. support for marijuana legalization grew from 36% to 67% during 2005-2019 (Pew Research Center, 2019). To identify discourse properties that accompanied this shift, we present the largest social media corpus on the topic (>3M documents) and the first to target Reddit (2008-2019). We used geolocation inference to distinguish U.S. discourse from international chatter and separate pre- and post-legalization content given marijuana’s uneven legal status across U.S. states. Research on online discourse has focused on generalized statements (e.g., moral arguments/sentiments). However, we combine topic modeling with hierarchical clustering to show that personal anecdotes and attitudes were a major driver of discourse especially during the legalization drive, at the expense of certain more generalizable themes. We classified comments by expressed attitude and presence of persuasion attempts using neural networks to show that the anecdotal discourse reflected not only social sharing, but also active argumentation.

Narratives of Consensus: a Decade of Reddit Discourse on Marijuana Legalization

Order effects occur when judgments about a hypothesis's probability given a sequence of information do not equal the probability of the same hypothesis when the information is reversed. Different experiments have been performed in the literature that supports evidence of order effects.

We proposed a Bayesian update model for order effects where each question can be thought of as a mini-experiment where the respondents reflect on their beliefs. We showed that order effects appear, and they have a simple cognitive explanation: the respondent's prior belief that two questions are correlated.

The proposed Bayesian model allows us to make several predictions: (1) we found certain conditions on the priors that limit the existence of order effects; (2) we show that, for our model, the QQ equality is not necessarily satisfied (due to symmetry assumptions); and (3) the proposed Bayesian model has the advantage of possessing fewer parameters than its quantum counterpart.

Order Effects in Bayesian Updates

What computations enable humans to leap from mere obser- vations to rich explanatory theories? Prior work has focused on stochastic algorithms that rely on random, local perturba- tions to model the search for satisfactory theories. Here we introduce a new approach inspired by the practice of ‘debug- ging’ from computer programming, whereby learners use past experience to constrain future proposals, and are thus able to consider large leaps in their current theory to fix specific de- ficiencies. We apply our ‘debugging’ algorithm to the mag- netism domain introduced by (Ullman, Goodman, & Tenen- baum, 2010) and compare its efficiency and accuracy to their stochastic-search algorithm. We find that our algorithm not only requires fewer iterations to find a solution, but that the solutions it finds more reliably recover the correct latent theo- ries, and are more robust to sparse data. Our findings suggest the promise of such constraint-based approaches to emulate the way humans efficiently navigate large, discrete hypothesis spaces.

Discovering computational principles in models and brains

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Are Explicit Frequency Counters Necessary in Computational Models of Early Word Segmentation?

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