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Toddlers can learn cause-effect relationships between single actions and outcomes. However, real-world causality is often more complex. We investigated whether toddlers (12- to 35-month-olds) can learn that a sequence of two actions is causally necessary, from observing the actions of an adult demonstrator. In Experiment 1, toddlers saw evidence that performing a two-action sequence (AB) on a puzzle-box was necessary to produce a sticker, and evidence that B alone was not sufficient. Toddlers were then given the opportunity to interact with the box and retrieve up to five stickers. Toddlers had difficulty reproducing the required two-action sequence, with the ability to do so improving with age. In Experiment 2, toddlers saw evidence that performing a single action (B) was sufficient to produce an effect (i.e., a sequence was not causally necessary). Toddlers were more successful and performed fewer sequences in Experiment 2, suggesting some sensitivity to the sequential causal structure.

CogSci 2021

Can 1- and 2-year-old toddlers learn causal action sequences?

**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.

Mental imagery is a core topic in cognitive science and central to most perception and action theories. Although mental imagery is often experimentally elicited, a growing body of literature highlights that people differ in their ability to consciously experience mental imagery with some reporting an inability to experience imagery. We examine the relationship between mental imagery vividness and performance on blind reach tasks within a VR environment. The findings indicated that accuracy did not significantly differ based on differences in imagery vividness during a baseline blind reach task. However, participants who reported experiencing more vivid mental imagery and received terminal visual feedback during a recalibration phase demonstrated greater shifts in movement strategy post-recalibration compared to those with less vivid imagery. The results indicate a degree of ‘perceptual learning’ following limited visual feedback that was predicted by vividness of imagery and feedback type. Implications for perception and action theory are discussed.

The Relationship Between Mental Imagery Vividness and Blind Reaching Performance

Human memory retains information related to survival more effectively, termed survival processing effect (SPE). Adaptive memory should also more effectively store reliable information than unreliable information. In an experiment (n=107) we asked whether the SPE depends on the reliability of information encoded by linguistic markers. In Turkish, evidentiality markers encode whether information is gathered firsthand (-miş) or not (-di), and provide cues on source reliability. We found that sentences processed for their relevance to survival were better recalled than those processed for their relevance to moving. This survival processing effect was significant for both direct and indirect evidentiality markers, although it was stronger for direct evidentiality. That SPE persisted in the indirect evidentiality condition suggests survival related information is privileged in encoding even when potentially marked as unreliable by linguistic markers. Thus, the effect of language on memory is not profound but rather computed online.

The effect of evidentiality markers on the survival processing effect

Confidence can be experienced for all kinds of decisions – evaluating the value of a piece of artwork, determining whether the lights are flickering, or remembering where we left our keys. These are fundamentally different kinds of decisions, but does that mean the confidence we feel is also fundamentally different for each one? Here, we test competing theories of domain-generality and domain-specificity in metacognitive ability by correlating individual differences in memory and perceptual confidence judgments in childhood. Children performed a recognition memory task and an area discrimination task followed by confidence judgments. Using 4 measures of metacognitive ability (indicated by higher confidence for accurate compared to inaccurate judgments: difference scores, meta-d’, MRatio, and HMeta-d’), we find no significant correlations between this ability in memory and perceptual tasks. These findings support an account of domain-specificity in children’s metacognitive abilities.

Perceptual and Memory Metacognition in Children

Suppose humans exist in order to reproduce. Does it follow that an individual who chooses not to reproduce is committing a moral wrong? Past work suggests that, right or wrong, beliefs about species-level purpose are associated with moral condemnation of individuals who choose not to fulfill that purpose. Across two experiments we investigate why. Experiment 1 replicates a causal effect of species-level purpose on moral condemnation. Experiment 2 finds evidence that when a species is believed to exist to perform some action, people infer that the action is good for the species, and that this belief in turn supports moral condemnation of individuals who choose not to perform the action. Together, these findings shed light on how our descriptive understanding can sometimes shape our prescriptive judgments.

Why belief in species purpose prompts moral condemnation of individuals who fail to fulfill that purpose

Category production tasks (aka semantic fluency) typically concentrate on concrete categories, meaning little is known about abstract categories and potential differences in their structure. Using a category production task for 67 concrete (e.g., animals, tools) and 50 abstract (e.g., science, emotion) categories, we investigated differences in produced member concepts. Abstract categories were smaller than concrete categories, their member concepts were generated more slowly, and had longer and more phonologically-distinct names. Abstract category members were grounded in sensorimotor experience (i.e., with high sensorimotor strength), though overall to a lesser extent than concrete category members. Several ostensibly abstract categories appeared amongst the highest-rated in sensorimotor strength (e.g., sport) while some ostensibly concrete categories were amongst the lowest-rated (e.g., chemical element). The data highlight linguistic and semantic differences in concrete and abstract category structure, but also that they share a common sensorimotor grounding.

Exploring the Structure and Grounding of Concrete and Abstract Categories

Prior work demonstrates that humans represent the approximate number of items across multiple sets simultaneously. Here we investigated whether adults can approximately divide multiple distinct overlapping sets simultaneously. Participants viewed arrays with dots of one to four colors (potential dividends) and a non-symbolic divisor of 2-4. Participants then estimated the quotient of the division operation. On each trial a cue indicated whether to divide over the superset of all dots or a color subset. The cue was presented before or after the brief presentation of the dividend array. We found that the capacity to divide over a pre-selected subset was not affected by set size. By comparing the estimation error between the cue-before and cue-after conditions, we determined that a substantial proportion of participants can approximately divide three ensembles simultaneously (two subsets plus the superset). These findings demonstrate the computational efficiency and possible utility of ensemble representations.

Approximate division on multiple visual ensembles

A widespread tool in analogy research consists of multiple-choice tests that require identifying a relation between two situations and mapping it to another two situations, to find the correct response option. A key source of difficulty during such tests is attributed to the complexity of mapping. However, most people do not construct mappings purely in the mind, but also compare the emerging mapping with the existing response options, so their features may affect the reasoning process. This study examined the impact of relational match of error options with respect to the correct option (the proportion of correct elements present in a given error option) on the option selection. Results indicate that option selection depends almost linearly on the relational match. Moreover, the higher working memory capacity of the participants, the more relationally matching errors they select. The study suggests careful design of error options in multiple-choice reasoning tests, because the pattern of these options can affect the solution process.

Why people err on multiple-choice analogical reasoning tests

How are emotions understood to relate to other aspects of mental life? Among US adults, concepts of mental life are anchored by a distinction between physiological sensations (BODY), social-emotional abilities (HEART), and perceptual-cognitive capacities (MIND); these conceptual units are in place by 7-9y (Weisman et al., 2017a, 2017b, 2018). Here we reanalyze these datasets to explore the structural relationships among BODY, HEART, and MIND. Across six studies (N=1758), adults’ assessments of the mental lives of robots, beetles, birds, goats, and other entities revealed a clear hierarchical structure: social-emotional abilities were virtually never granted to any entity perceived to lack physiological sensations or perceptual-cognitive abilities. This is consistent with a folk theory—similar to prominent theories in affective science—in which emotions emerge from the combination of more basic capacities for sensation and cognition. Studies of US children (4-9y, N=445) suggest that it takes years for children to acquire this understanding.

Emotions as the product of body and mind: The hierarchical structure of folk concepts of mental life among US adults and children

Studies in psycho-linguistics have provided compelling evidence that theoretical syntactic structures have cognitive correlates that inform and influence language perception. Generative grammar models also present a principled way to represent a plethora of hierarchical structures outside the domain of language. Hierarchical aspects of musical structure, in particular, are often described through grammar models. Whether such models carry perceptual relevance in music, however, requires further study. 
To address the descriptive adequacy of a grammar model in music, unfamiliar musical phrases consisting of chord progressions within the Jazz idiom were used, and zero to three chords were cut from the end of each phrase. A total of 150 participants were then presented with these stimuli and asked to provide a Closure Response, that is to predict how many more chords (0, 1, 2, or 3) were expected before the chord progression was complete. Simultaneously, a grammar model of hierarchical structure as well as a bigram model were trained over a corpus of 150 expert-annotated Jazz tunes. The models were then used to estimate probability distributions of Closure Responses in the stimuli presented to the participants. Bayesian mixed-effects models reveal that the models carry predictive value for the participants' response distributions and that the hierarchical model contains incremental predictive information over the bigram model. The present results suggest that -- akin to language -- hierarchical relationships between musical events have a cognitive correlate, which influences the perception and interpretation of music.

Hierarchical syntactic structure predicts listeners’ sequence completion in music

Laughter and gaze have an important role in managing and coordinating social interactions. We investigate whether laughs performing distinct pragmatic functions, either related to humour or to a potentially social discomforting utterance or situation, are accompanied by different gaze patterns. Using a multimodal corpus of dyadic taste-testing interactions, we show that people tend to not look at their partner while producing laughs related to humour, whereas laughs that relate to potential social discomfort are accompanied by gaze at the partner. With respect to the non-laughing partner's gaze at the laugher we observe the opposite pattern around the laughter offset. We show that gaze contributes to the synchronisation and alignment of laughter production, analogously to previously reported results for speech turn-taking. Our study also provides empirical evidence to the debate about gaze aversion, opposing the view that social stress is the main explanatory factor.

Can 1- and 2-year-old toddlers learn causal action sequences?

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The Relationship Between Mental Imagery Vividness and Blind Reaching Performance

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