United States

The current study examined the extent to which the cohesion detected in readers’ constructed responses to multiple documents was predictive of persuasive, source-based essay quality. Participants (N=95) completed multiple-documents reading tasks wherein they were prompted to think-aloud, self-explain, or evaluate the sources while reading a set of four texts. They were then asked to write a source-based essay based on their reading. Natural Language Processing techniques were used to automatically analyze the cohesion of the constructed responses at both within- and across-documents levels. Results indicated that within-document cohesion was negatively related to essay quality, whereas across-documents cohesion was positively related to essay quality. Further, these relations differed by instructional condition such that strategic instructions to either self-explain or evaluate sources seemed to promote across-text integration, compared to thinking aloud. Overall, this study indicates that the cohesion of constructed responses to text can provide insights into the coherence of the mental representations readers construct while reading multiple documents.

CogSci 2021

Coherence-Building in Multiple Document Comprehension

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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.

**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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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.

technical paper

People can identify the number of objects in small sets rapidly and without error but become increasingly noisy for larger sets. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying these ubiquitous psychophysics are poorly understood. We present a model of a limited-capacity visual system optimized to individuate and remember the location of objects in a scene which gives rise to all key aspects of number psychophysics, including error-free small number perception and scalar variability for larger numbers. We therefore propose that number psychophysics can be understood as an emergent property of primitive perceptual mechanisms --- namely, the process of identifying and representing individual objects in a scene. To test our theory, we ran two experiments: a change-localization task to measure participants' memory for the locations of objects (Experiment 1) and a numerical estimation task (Experiment 2). Our model accounts well for participants' performance in both experiments, despite only being optimized to efficiently encode where objects are present in a scene. Our results demonstrate that the key psychophysical features of numerical cognition do not arise from separate modules or capacities specific to number, but rather from lower-level constraints on perception which are manifested even in non-numerical tasks.

The psychophysics of number arise from resource-limited spatial memory

Learning to count is an important example of the broader human capacity for systematic generalization, and the development of counting is often characterized by an inflection point when children rapidly acquire proficiency with the procedures that support this ability. We aimed to model this process by training a reinforcement learning agent to select N items from a binary vector when instructed (known as the give-$N$ task). We found that a memory-augmented modular network architecture based on the recently proposed Emergent Symbol Binding Network (ESBN) exhibited an inflection during learning that resembled human development. This model was also capable of systematic extrapolation outside the range of its training set - for example, trained only to select between 1 and 10 items, it could succeed at selecting 11 to 15 items as long as it could make use of an arbitrary count sequence of at least that length. The close parallels to child development and the capacity for extrapolation suggest that our model could shed light on the emergence of systematicity in humans.

Modelling the development of counting with memory-augmented neural networks

Prediction error is known to enhance priming effects for familiar syntactic structures; it also strengthens the formation of new declarative memories. Here, we investigate whether violating expectations may aid the acquisition of new abstract syntactic structures, too, by enhancing memory for individual instances which can then form the basis for abstraction. In a cross-situational artificial language learning paradigm, participants were exposed to novel syntactic structures in ways that either violated their expectations (Surprisal group) or that conformed to them (Control group). Results from a delayed post-test show that participants in the Surprisal group developed stronger representations of the structures’ form-meaning mappings and were better able to generalize them to new instances, relative to the Control group.

Expectation Violation Leads to Generalization: The Effect of Prediction Error on the Acquisition of New Syntactic Structures

Symmetry is ubiquitous in nature, in logic and mathematics, and in perception, language, and thought. Although humans are exquisitely sensitive to visual symmetry (e.g., of a butterfly), linguistic symmetry goes far beyond visuospatial properties: Many words refer to abstract, logically symmetrical concepts (e.g., equal, marry). This raises a question: Do representations of symmetry correspond across language and vision, and if so, how? To address this question, we used a cross-modal matching paradigm. On each trial, adult participants observed a visual stimulus (either symmetrical or non-symmetrical) and had to choose between a symmetrical and non-symmetrical English predicate unrelated to the stimulus (e.g., "negotiate" vs. "propose"). In a first study with visual events (symmetrical collision or asymmetrical launch), participants reliably chose the predicate matching the event's symmetry. A second study showed that this "matching" generalized to static objects, and was weakened when the stimuli's binary-relational nature was made less apparent (i.e., one object with a symmetrical contour, rather than two symmetrically configured objects). Taken together, our findings support the existence of an abstract relational concept of symmetry which humans access via both perceptual and linguistic means. More broadly, this work sheds light on the rich, structured nature of the language-cognition interface, and points towards a possible avenue for acquisition of word-to-world mappings for the seemingly inaccessible logical symmetry of linguistic terms.

Where Word and World Meet: Intuitive Correspondence Between Visual and Linguistic Symmetry

Conversational interaction involves integrating the perspectives of multiple interlocutors with varying knowledge and beliefs. An issue that has received little attention in cognitive modeling of pragmatics is how speakers deal with the choice of words like come that are inherently perspectival. How do such lexical perspectival items fit into a speaker's overall integration of conversational perspective? We present new experimental results on production of perspectival words, in which speakers have varying degrees of certainty about their addressee's perspective. We show that the Multiple Perspectives Model closely fits the empirical data, lending support to the hypothesis that use of perspectival words can be naturally accommodated as a type of conversational perspective taking.

Come Together: Integrating Perspective Taking and Perspectival Expressions

Traditional investigations of quantifier-negation scope ambiguity (e.g., Everyone didn't go, meaning that no one went or not everyone went) have focused on universal quantifiers, and how ambiguity in interpretation preferences is due to the logical operators themselves and the syntactic relation between those operators. We investigate a broader range of quantifiers in combination with negation, observing differences in interpretation preferences both across quantifiers and also within the same quantifier (confirmed by corpus analysis). To explain this variation, we extend a computational cognitive model that incorporates pragmatic context-related factors, and which previously accounted for every-negation, to predict human interpretation preferences also for some and no. We evaluate the model's predictions against human judgments for quantifier-negation utterances, finding a strong qualitative and quantitative match when the listener has particular expectations about the world in which the utterance occurs. These results suggest that pragmatic factors can explain variation in interpretation preferences.

Pragmatic factors can explain variation in interpretation preferences for quantifier-negation utterances: A computational approach

Planning is hard. The use of subgoals can make planning more tractable, but selecting these subgoals is computationally costly. What algorithms might enable us to reap the benefits of planning using subgoals while minimizing the computational overhead of selecting them? We propose visual scoping, a strategy that interleaves planning and acting by alternately defining a spatial region as the next subgoal and selecting actions to achieve it. We evaluated our visual scoping algorithm on a variety of physical assembly problems against two baselines: planning all subgoals in advance and planning without subgoals. We found that visual scoping achieves comparable task performance to the subgoal planner while requiring only a fraction of the total computational cost.Together, these results contribute to our understanding of how humans might make efficient use of cognitive resources to solve complex planning problems.

Visual scoping operations for physical assembly

How do adults understand children's speech? Children's productions over the course of language development often bear little resemblance to typical adult pronunciations, yet caregivers nonetheless reliably recover meaning from them. Here, we employ a suite of Bayesian models of spoken word recognition to understand how adults overcome the noisiness of child language, showing that communicative success between children and adults relies heavily on adult inferential processes. By evaluating competing models on phonetically-annotated child language from the Providence corpus, we show that adults' recovered meanings are best predicted by prior expectations fitted specifically to the child language environment, rather than to typical adult-adult language. After quantifying the contribution of this "child-directed listening" over developmental time, we discuss the consequences for theories of language acquisition, as well as the implications for commonly-used methods for assessing children's linguistic proficiency.

Child-directed Listening: How Caregiver Inference Enables Children's Early Verbal Communication

Because words have multiple meanings, language users must often choose appropriate meanings according to the context of use. How this potential ambiguity affects first language learning, especially word learning, is unknown. Here, we present the first large-scale study of how children are exposed to, and themselves use, ambiguous words in their language learning environments. We tag 180,000 words in two longitudinal child language corpora with word senses from WordNet, focusing between 9 and 51 months and limiting to words from a popular parental vocabulary report. We then compare the diversity of sense usage in adult speech around children to that observed in a sample of adult language, as well as the diversity of sense usage in children's own productions. To accomplish this we use a Bayesian model-based estimate of sense entropy, a measure of diversity that takes into account uncertainty inherent in small sample sizes. This reveals that sense diversity in caregivers' speech to children is similar to that observed in a sample of adult-directed written material, and that children's use of nouns---but not verbs---is similarly diverse to that of adults. Finally, we show that sense entropy is a significant predictor of vocabulary development: children begin to produce words with a higher diversity of adult sense usage at later ages. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of word learning.

Quantifying Lexical Ambiguity in Speech To and From English-Learning Children

When two people disagree about matters of taste, neither is in the wrong: There is nothing contradictory in a dialog where one interlocutor says 'The rollercoaster was scary!' and the other responds 'No, it was not scary.' This contrasts with disagreements about objective facts. This phenomenon is known as faultless disagreement, and is central for theorizing about subjective expressions. Faultless disagreement is typically assumed to stem from subjective expressions having a special semantics. We present evidence that people’s judgments of faultless disagreement are sensitive not only to the lexical content of a sentence, but also to the broader discourse context (properties of the interlocutors in the dialog) and to extra-contextual factors (participants’ own attitudes about that particular domain). These results problematize arguments that faultless disagreement stems directly from the semantics of subjective lexical items.

Coherence-Building in Multiple Document Comprehension

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Coherence-Building in Multiple Document Comprehension

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The psychophysics of number arise from resource-limited spatial memory

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Motivational Gestures in Robot-Assisted Language Learning: A Study of Cognitive Engagement using EEG Brain Activity

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