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Many cognitive models assume that stimuli can be represented as points in a latent psychological space. However, it has been difficult to provide these spaces with a geometric structure where the distance between items accurately reflects their subjective dissimilarity. In this paper, we propose a new method to give psychological spaces a geometric structure by equating the amount of change undergone by a stimulus with the arc length of a curve in psychological space. We then assess our method with a categorization experiment where participants classified continuously changing visual stimuli according to their rate of change. Our results indicate that individuals’ judgements are well predicted by arc length, suggesting that it may be a promising geometric constraint for psychological spaces in other contexts.

CogSci 2021

Arc Length as a Geometric Constraint for Psychological Spaces

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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!<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**

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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.

poster

Adults have been shown to favor stable causal relationships – those that hold robustly across background contexts – in their actions and causal/explanatory generalizations (Vasilyeva et al, 2018). Here we explore how this preference develops. We present results from one study with 141 4-7-year-olds investigating whether children pay attention to causal stability when they explain observations and design interventions in novel contexts. We report developmental shifts in reliance on causal stability in a range of inferential tasks, highlight the important role of perceived average causal strength in determining children’s causal preferences, and discuss the implications of our findings for theories of early causal learning. To our knowledge, this is the first study exploring the role of stability in children’s causal reasoning.

“It Depends”: How Children Reason about Stable and Unstable Causes

Procrastination is ubiquitous, but its underlying processes are poorly understood. Studies of procrastination have used self-report questionnaires and therefore have limited use as the basis for process models. As typical procrastination behavior is characterized by a delay in starting the work and rushing in the end, we argue that studies should emphasize the time course of progress. We designed a reading task to quantify the time course of procrastination. Subjects were given seven days to work online on a boring and lengthy reading task. We tested whether reward delay is a predictor of procrastination. We introduce a metric for quantifying the degree of procrastination from the time course of progress. The degree of procrastination tends to be higher in the delayed reward condition than that in the instantaneous condition. We also observed great individual variation in the progress course. Further work needs to investigate what factors contribute to this variability.

Designing a behavioral experiment to study the factors underlying procrastination

Students often receive encouragement ("You can do it!") to take on and stick with challenges, yet they don’t always listen. Past work suggests that domain knowledge underlies speaker credibility. We propose that students find encouragement more or less motivating based not only on the speaker’s domain knowledge (e.g., math), but also on their knowledge of the student’s abilities (e.g., math abilities). Adolescents (n=369; ages 11-19) said they would be more likely to seek out and listen to encouragement from a hypothetical person who has both knowledge of the domain and their abilities compared to someone who has knowledge of just one or neither. When asked to reason about real people in their lives (parents, teachers, peers), knowledge of domain and ability also significantly predicted whose encouragement participants would seek out and listen to. Ongoing work is experimentally testing this hypothesis with behavioral measures of persistence and challenge-seeking.

Who is motivating? Students evaluate encouragement based on speaker’s knowledge

In social psychology, a common finding is that people prefer confirmation-biased information. Although this confirmatory information seeking is commonly treated as an error in judgment, we note that biased sources of information can sometimes be more useful than more accurate sources. Such confirmatory sources will only advise someone to deviate from the policy they think is most useful when these sources are sure taking alternative action is correct. For this reason, these sources can allow people to avoid particularly costly errors. Avoiding such costly errors can sometimes be worth the price of inaccurate beliefs, even though these beliefs lead to more errors in total. In two studies, we find initial support for this idea. Within a Partially Observable Markov Decision process, we show that participants prefer optimistically-biased information when they would otherwise miss out on a particularly large reward, and pessimistically-biased information when they would otherwise face particularly strong punishment.

Deciding to be wrong: Optimism and pessimism in motivated information search

Will people maintain their initial intuitive decision even when they know the rational answer is different? Some dual-process models assume that there is a process of detection and correction of initial intuitive biases. But do these models also account for patterns of behaviour that some people exhibit when they return to their initial intuitive response, even after acknowledging the rational response?

Over four studies we tested for acquiescence by asking participants to solve congruent and incongruent problems utilising a three-response decision paradigm, manipulating base-rate and ratios as well as measuring both Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI) responses. 

Results suggest that for incongruent problems participants demonstrated acquiescence across all studies. In addition, although individuals appear to be more rational, and can explicitly recognise the rational response, in some case when moderated by task characteristics, and cognitive reflection, they are unable to supress their initial intuitive decision.

Moderators of Acquiescing to Intuition: Strength of Intuition, Task Characteristics and Individual Differences.

Attractiveness research is typically conducted using static photographs of human faces, often cropped or otherwise edited. We present a database of videos of faces, while talking with synchronized audio that will facilitate more ecologically valid, multimodal research into face and voice attractiveness. Our database contains videos, synchronized voice recordings, and photographs of 20 male and 20 female German speakers under different emotional conditions (neutral, sad, happy, angry, flirty). Recordings were simultaneously made from three different angles (frontal, profile, 3/4 view) in front of a green screen. We report the results of a comprehensive validation of this database to make it usable for multisensory empirical aesthetics research, but also for face or emotion research. An online study was conducted to collect ratings on several dimensions including general attractiveness, allowing us to uncover the effects of predictors for facial attractiveness in a natural setting.

Vienna Talking Faces: A multimodal database of synchronized videos (ViTaFa)

Corpus-based models of lexical strength have questioned the role of word frequency in lexical organization. Specifically, closer fits to lexical behavior data on single words have been obtained by measures of contextual diversity, which modifies frequency by ignoring word repetition in context, semantic diversity, which considers the semantic consistency of contextual word distribution, and socially-based semantic diversity, which encodes the communication patterns of individuals across discourses (Adelman, Brown & Quesada, 2006; Jones, Johns, & Recchia, 2012; Johns, in press). The present work aimed at determining if diversity drives lexical organization also at the level multiword units. Normative ratings of familiarity for 210 English idioms (Libben & Titone, 2008) were predicted from contextual, semantic and socially-based diversity measures computed from a 55-billion word corpus of Reddit comments. Results confirmed the superiority of diversity measures over word frequency, suggesting that multiword idiomatic phrases show similar lexical organization dynamics as single words.

Contextual Diversity and the Lexical Organization of Multiword Expressions

Long perceptuo-motor sequences underlie skills from walking to language learning, and are often learned gradually and unconsciously in the face of noise. We used a non-parametric Bayesian n-gram model (Teh, 2006) to characterize the multi-day evolution of human subjects’ implicit representation of a serial reaction time task sequence with second-order contingencies. The reaction time for an element in the sequence depended on zero, one and more preceding elements at the same time, predicting frequency, repetition and higher-order learning effects. Our trial-level dynamic model captured these coexistent facilitation effects by seamlessly combining information from shorter and longer windows onto past events. We show how shifting their priors over window lengths allowed subjects to grow and refine their internal sequence representations week by week.

Tracking the Unknown: Modeling Long-Term Implicit Skill Acquisition as Non-Parametric Bayesian Sequence Learning

Although it is documented that vision can impact flavor perception, less known are the interrelations between subsets of cross-modal factors. Within the framework of cross-modal perception three between-group experiments were conducted to determine the impact of color and container type on the flavor perception. Two different containers and 10 colors were tested in two online experiments (n1 = 67, n2 = 63); in the third experiment two non-sweetened colored drinks were tested (n = 32). Hedonic, associative, and emotional measurements were applied.
Our results indicate that color can increase the expected sense of flavor. For instance, red, pink, orange (average values 3.7, 3.7, 3.6 on a 5 pt scale) are the strongest examples of sweetness. For some colors (e.g., red and brown) predicted sweetness is also determined by the type of container (bottle vs. glass). Additionally, the sense of freshness as a cross-modal factor increases the likeability of the drink.

Impacts of colors and container types on predicted and perceived flavor of non-alcoholic beverages

Learning the generative model of the world based on limited data is an important problem faced by both human and artificial intelligence. How should one choose among multiple generative models that all well fit the existing data? Occam's razor suggests that one should select the simplest one. Here we asked whether Occam’s razor applies to human learning of probability distribution models. On each trial, participants saw 20~160 samples of spatial locations from a Gaussian mixture model and were asked to choose among four different Gaussian mixture models the one that had generated the samples. In three experiments, we found participants did not, as Occam’s razor would suggest, prefer the one-cluster option that appears to be simplest, other things being the same. Instead, they showed preference for options with two or three clusters. Such violation of Occam’s razor sheds light on distinction between complexity-based and experience-based priors for model selection.

Arc Length as a Geometric Constraint for Psychological Spaces

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“It Depends”: How Children Reason about Stable and Unstable Causes

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