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The goal of the present study was to use content analysis to gain insight into the process of problem-solving of novice and expert programmers. While classic work on programmers identifies goals / plans as key constructs needed to code, there is relatively little work using protocol analysis. We recruited 7 expert and 12 novice rogrammers who completed up to 3 brief programming problems while providing a talk-aloud of their inner problem solving process. Based on analysis of the transcriptions of this talk aloud data, we identified the goals and steps used, as well as the broad differences between experts and novices in their problem solving process. These differences were formalized into python ACT-R models, and model output was compared to programs written by human participants.

CogSci 2021

Investigating novice and expert programmers&#39; problem solving via protocol analysis

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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.

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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.

Investigating novice and expert programmers' problem solving via protocol analysis

poster

Visual perception initiated with a low-level derivation of Spatio-temporal edges and advances to a higher-level perception of filled surfaces. According to the isomorphic theory, this perceptual filling-in is governed by an activation spread across the retinotopic map, driven from edges to interiors. Here we propose two biologically plausible spiking neural networks, which demonstrate perceptual filling-in by resolving the Poisson equation. Each network exhibits a distinct dynamic and architecture and could be realized and further integrated in the brain.

Biologically Plausible Spiking Neural Networks for Perceptual Filling-In

The ability to represent semantic structure in the environment — objects, parts, and relations — is a core aspect of human visual perception and cognition. Here we leverage recent advances in program synthesis to develop an algorithm for learning the part-based structure of drawings as represented by graphics programs. This algorithm iteratively learns a library of abstract subroutines that can be used to more compactly represent a set of drawings by capturing common structural elements. Our experiments explore how this algorithm exploits statistical reg- ularities across drawings to learn new subroutines. Together, these findings highlight the potential for understanding human visual concept learning via program-like abstractions.

Learning part-based abstractions for visual object concepts

We present the first analysis of multi-frequency neural entrainment to dynamic visual features which drives sign language comprehension. Using the measure of EEG coherence to optical flow in video stimuli, we are able to classify fluent signers’ brain states as denoting online language comprehension, or non-comprehension during watching of non-linguistic videos that are equivalent in low-level spatiotemporal features and high-level scene parameters. The data also indicates that lower frequencies, such as 1 Hz and 4 Hz, contribute substantially to brain state classification, indicating relevance of neural coherence to the signal at these frequencies to language comprehension. These findings suggest that fluent signers rely on predictive processing during online comprehension.

Application of machine learning to signal entrainment identifies predictive processing in sign language.

Deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL) methods can train artificial agents (AAs) to reach or exceed human-level performance. However, in multiagent contexts requiring competitive behavior or where the aim is to use AAs for human training, the qualitative behaviors AAs adopt may be just as important as their performance to ensure representative training. This paper compares human behaviors and performance when competing against either a human expert or an AA opponent trained using Deep RL on a 2-dimensional version of Pong. Results show that participants were not sensitive to the movement differences between the human expert and AA. Further, the participants did not alter their behaviors, except to compensate for differences in the environmental states caused by the opponents. The paper concludes with discussion on the potential impacts of AA training on human behavior with regard to representative design in the areas of skill development and team training.

Perceptual Sensitivity to an Artificial Co-Actor in Competitive 2D Pong

From a young age, we can select actions to achieve desired goals, infer the goals of other agents, and learn causal relations in our environment through social interactions. Crucially, these abilities are productive and generative: we can impute desires to others that we have never held ourselves. These abilities are often captured by only partially overlapping models, each requiring substantial changes to fit combinations of abilities. Here, in an attempt to unify previous models, we present a neural network underpinned by the linearly solvable Markov Decision Process (LMDP) framework which permits a distributed representation of tasks. The network contains two pathways: one captures the desirability of states, and another encodes the passive dynamics of state transitions in the absence of control. Interactions between pathways are bound by a principle of rational action, enabling generative inference of actions, goals, and causal relations supported by gradient updates to parts of the network.

Inferring Actions, Intentions, and Causal Relations in a Deep Neural Network

Quantum probability theory has successfully provided accurate descriptions of behavior in decision making, and here we apply the same principles to two category learning tasks, one using overlapping, information-integration (II) categories and the other using overlapping, rule-based (RB) categories. Since II categories lack verbalizable descriptions, unlike RB categories, we assert that an II categorization decision is characterized by quantum probability theory, whereas an RB categorization decision is governed by classical probability theory. In our experiment, participants learn to categorize stimuli as members of either category S or K during an acquisition phase, and then rate the likelihood on a scale of 0 to 5 that a stimulus belongs to one category and subsequently perform the same rating for the other category during a transfer phase. With II categories but not RB ones, the quantum model notably outperforms an analogous Markov model and the order effects on likelihood ratings are significant.

Comparing Markov and quantum random walk models of categorization decisions

The visual system does not require extensive signal in its inputs to compute rich, three-dimensional (3D) shape percepts. Even under highly degraded stimuli conditions, we can accurately interpret images in terms of volumetric objects. What computations support such broad generalization in the visual system? To answer, we exploit two degraded image modalities – silhouettes and two-tone “Mooney” images – alongside regular shaded images. We test two distinct approaches to vision: deep networks for classification and analysis-by-synthesis for scene inference. Deep networks perform substantially sub-human even after training on 18 times more images per category compared to the existing large-scale image sets for object classification. We also present a novel analysis-by-synthesis architecture that infers 3D scenes from images via optimization in a differentiable, physically-based renderer. This model also performs substantially sub-human. Nevertheless, both approaches can explain some of the key behavioral patterns. We discuss the insights these results provide for reverse-engineering visual cognition.

Seeing in the dark: Testing deep neural network and analysis-by-synthesis accounts of 3D shape perception with highly degraded images

The N400 component of the event related brain potential is widely used to investigate language and meaning processing. However, despite much research the component’s functional basis remains actively debated. Recent work showed that the update of the predictive representation of sentence meaning (semantic update, or SU) generated by the Sentence Gestalt model (McClelland, St. John, & Taraban, 1989) consistently displayed a similar pattern to the N400 amplitude in a series of conditions known to modulate this event-related potential. These results led (Rabovsky, Hansen, and McClelland,2018) to suggest that the N400 might reflect change in a probabilistic representation of meaning corresponding to an implicit semantic prediction error. However, a limitation of this work is that the model was trained on a small artificial training corpus and thus could not be presented with the same naturalistic stimuli presented in empirical experiments. In the present study, we overcome this limitation and directly model the amplitude of the N400 elicited during naturalistic sentence processing by using as predictor the SU generated by a Sentence Gestalt model trained on a large corpus of texts. The results reported in this paper corroborate the hypothesis that the N400 component reflects the change in a probabilistic representation of meaning after every word presentation. Further analyses demonstrate that the SU of the Sentence Gestalt model and the amplitude of the N400 are influenced similarly by the stochastic and positional properties of the linguistic input.

Predicting the N400 ERP component using the Sentence Gestalt model trained on a large scale corpus

Interaction with environmental resources such as technological tools facilitates conceptual learning and preparation for future learning. Writing and compiling code, failing, and trying again fosters deep understanding of computational concepts. This study investigates knowledge gap awareness as potential mediating cognitive mechanism in the learning process from situated interaction with a technological tool to internalized conceptual understanding. Students engaged in a tool-mediated or tool-dissociated learning activity on functional programming and were subsequently assessed on their learning again under tool-mediated or tool-dissociated conditions. Students’ assessment performances were triangulated with their open comments and questionnaire responses on the study’s learning and assessment activities. The findings support the assumption of tool-mediation facilitating knowledge gap awareness, which in turn facilitates conceptual learning.

Knowledge-Gap Awareness as Mediating Cognitive Mechanism in Tool-Mediated Learning in Computer Science: A Multi-Method Experimental Study

We use a model to explore the implications of ACT-R's learning and forgetting mechanisms to understand learning and retention on a complex task. The model performs a spreadsheet task that has 14 non-iterated subtasks. The model predicts a learning curve and knowledge decay for different learning stages. The model's learning curve fits the human data well for the first four trials without decay. When decay is examined, however, we have to make modifications to the retention equation for the model's predictions to match data and the shapes predicted by the other learning theories. To fix this anomaly, we modified the effect of time on decay (adjusting time outside the experiment to less than the effect of time in the experiment) and the strength of newly learned memories (less well known than the previous default value). From these results, we learn that training and testing have been confounded in many studies.

Investigating novice and expert programmers' problem solving via protocol analysis

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