United States

Understanding how we judge effortfulness promises insight into the myriad choices we make each day. Here, we present research investigating a curious finding: In Dunn et al., 2019, individuals anticipated reading a single rotated word as more effortful than reading two upright words. This contravenes the expectation that the latter will take significantly longer. In Dunn et al. (2019) participants had limited experience engaging in the task beyond judging anticipated effort. In the present investigation participants performed demand selection and forced-choice tasks for which they read either one rotated or two upright words. We analyze results in terms of choice, accuracy, vocal onset time, and task duration. Participants still generally considered reading two words as less effortful (and preferable) to one rotated word but, interestingly, this tendency diminished as the task wore on. We discuss implications for understanding individuals’ effort-based choices.

CogSci 2021

Cognitive Effort and Preference: A Curious Case of Rotated Words

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

poster

### 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!<br><br>

**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**

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/464h1m3iU68" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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.

Beliefs have long been posited to be a predictor of behavior. However, empirical investigations into the relationship between beliefs (e.g., “vaccines cause autism”) and behaviors (e.g., vaccinating one’s child), mostly correlational in nature, have provided conflicting findings. To explore the causal impact of beliefs on behaviors, participants first rated the accuracy of a set of statements (health-related in Study 1, politically-charged in Studies 2 and 3) and chose corresponding campaigns to donate available funds. They were then provided with relevant evidence in favor of the correct statements and against the incorrect statements. Finally, participants rated the accuracy of the initial set of statements again and were given a chance to change their donation choices. The results of all three studies show that belief change predicts behavioral change, finding of particular relevance for interventions aimed at promoting constructive behaviors such as recycling, donating to charity, or employing preventative health measures.

Belief Change Triggers Behavioral Change

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

We asked whether it is possible to simultaneously activate two timelines in the human mind. We hypothesized that the lateral (left-right) and sagittal (back-front) spatial dimensions can be coactivated and expected the congruent space-time mappings of each dimension (back-past front-future and left-past right-future), but not the non-coherent ones, to prime each other. Participants were asked to keep in mind the two spatial dimensions as discrete entities. Spanish speakers categorized the temporal reference of sentences by pressing a sagittal directional key with their left or right hand. Results suggest that (i) full congruence facilitates the spatial representation of time the most, (ii) full incongruence interferes the most with the spatial representation of time, and (iii)
the two partial forms of congruence produce similar interference effects between the two spatial dimensions and time. The results were interpreted according to the Coherent Working Models approach.

Do left-right and back-front mental timelines activate simultaneously?

There is broad empirical evidence suggesting that higher-level cognitive processes, such as language, categorization, and emotion, shape human visual perception. For example, categories that we acquire throughout lifetime have been found to alter our perceptual discriminations and distort perceptual processing. Here, we study categorical effects on perception by adapting the perceptual matching task to minimize the potential non-perceptual influences on the results. We found that the learned category-color associations bias human color matching judgments away from their category ideal on a color continuum. This effect, however, unequally biased two objects (probe and manipulator) that were simultaneously present on the screen, thus demonstrating a more nuanced picture of top-down influences on perception than has been assumed both by the theories of categorical perception and the El Greco methodological fallacy. We suggest that only the concurrent memory for visually present objects is subject to a contrast-from-caricature distortion due to category-association learning.

Categories affect color perception of only some simultaneously present objects

Dividing attention by loading working memory is an effective method of probing the declarative and procedural underpinnings of linguistic knowledge. The current study explores WM/DA effects on four specific L2 domains: morphology (aspect versus case), syntax and semantics (collocations). We contrast performance of 68 learners of Polish as a foreign language (L1 Chinese) in a grammaticality judgement task in baseline and divided attention conditions. We found corroborating evidence for heightened dependency on declarative memory in early (A2) L2 learners across all linguistic categories and in both experimental conditions. While the lexical judgement of more advanced (B1) learners also proved vulnerable to secondary-task interference, introduction of additional cognitive load had a positive effect on participants’ grammatical judgement, yielding more accurate responses in the aspect category. These results point towards the need for pursuing a new line of inquiry into a potentially facilitative role of cognitive load on L2 learners’ grammatical processing.

The ‘know-what’ and the ‘know-how’: importance of declarative and procedural memory systems in the L2 learning of morphology, syntax and semantics

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

Memory is reliably enhanced for information read aloud compared with information read silently—this is known as the production effect. Theoretical accounts of this effect have been largely verbal in nature with very little exception, yet its robustness (and that of related phenomena) suggests that it is worth integrating into existing computational approaches to memory. A leading account of the production effect proposes that production leads to encoding of additional features at study and that these features are available at test to assist retrieval, conferring the observed memory benefit. We implement a version of this account into the Retrieving Effectively from Memory (REM) computational framework and examine its ability to capture key phenomena associated with the production effect. We compare and contrast the current implementation in REM with a pre-existing implementation of this effect in MINERVA2, in addition to discussing alternative conceptualizations and future work.

Modelling the production effect in recognition memory

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.

Local Sampling with Momentum Accounts for Human Random Sequence Generation

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.

Cognitive Effort and Preference: A Curious Case of Rotated Words

Downloads

Next from CogSci 2021

Belief Change Triggers Behavioral Change

Similar lecture

Bi-directional Cognitive Thinking Network for Machine Reading Comprehension

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES