United States

We propose a computational model of social preference judgments that accounts for the degree of an agents’ uncertainty about the preferences of others. Underlying this model is the principle that, in the face of social uncertainty, people interpret social agents’ behavior under an assumption of expected utility maximization. We evaluate our model in two experiments which each test a different kind of social preference reasoning: predicting social choices given information about social preferences, and inferring social preferences after observing social choices. The results support our model and highlight how uncertainty influences our social judgments.

CogSci 2021

Reasoning about social attitudes with uncertain beliefs

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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,**
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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.

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

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

While humans routinely encode and retrieve memories in groups, the bulk of our knowledge of human memory comes from paradigms with individuals in isolation. The primary phenomenon of interest within the relatively new field of collaborative memory is collaborative inhibition: the tendency for collaborative groups to underperform in free recall tasks compared to nominal groups of the same size. This effect has been found in a variety of materials and group compositions (Rajaram & Pereira-Pasarin, 2010). However, the majority of research in this field is guided by verbal theories without formal computational models. In this paper we adapt the Search of Associative Memory (SAM; Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981) model to collaborative free recall. We present a framework to scale SAM to collaborative paradigms with multiple SAM models working together. Our simulation results with the collaborative SAM model suggest that retrieval disruption, responsible for the part-set cuing effect in individuals, is also the cause of collaborative inhibition when multiple models are working together. Our work provides an existence proof that SAM can act as a unified theory to explain both individual and collaborative memory effects, and offers a framework for future predictions of scaling to increased group sizes, shared knowledge, and spread of false memories.

Towards a Cognitive Model of Collaborative Memory

Numerous studies in cognitive development have provided converging evidence that Joint Attention (JA) is crucial for children to learn about the world together with their parents. However, a closer look reveals that, in the literature, JA has been operationally defined in different ways. For example, some definitions require explicit signals of “awareness” of being in JA—such as gaze following, while others simply define JA as shared gaze to an object or activity. But what if “awareness” is possible without gaze following? The present study examines egocentric images collected via head-mounted eye-trackers during parent-child toy play. A Convolutional Neural Network model was used to process and learn to classify raw egocentric images as JA vs not JA. We demonstrate individual child and parent egocentric views can be classified as being part of a JA bout at above chance levels. This provides new evidence that an individual can be “aware” they are in JA based solely on the in-the-moment visual information. Moreover, both models trained on child views and those trained on parent views leveraged the visual properties associated with visual object holding to improve classification accuracy—suggesting a critical role for object handling in not only establishing JA, as shown in previous research, but also in inferring the social partner’s attentional state during JA.

Modeling joint attention from egocentric vision

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.

Coherence-Building in Multiple Document Comprehension

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

Systems of personal pronouns (e.g.,`you' and `I') vary widely across languages, but at the same time not all possible systems are attested. Linguistic theories have generally accounted for this in terms of strong grammatical constraints, but recent experimental work challenges this view. Here, we take a novel approach to understanding personal pronoun systems by invoking a recent information-theoretic framework for semantic systems that predicts that languages efficiently compress meanings into forms. We find that a test set of cross-linguistically attested personal pronoun systems achieves near-optimal compression, supporting the hypothesis that efficient compression shapes semantic systems. Further, our best-fitting model includes an egocentric bias that favors a salient speaker representation, accounting for a well-known typological generalization of person systems (`Zwicky's Generalization') without the need for a hard grammatical constraint.

Let's talk (efficiently) about us: Person systems achieve near-optimal compression

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.

Reasoning about social attitudes with uncertain beliefs

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The psychophysics of number arise from resource-limited spatial memory

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Reasoning about social attitudes with uncertain beliefs

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Next from CogSci 2021

The psychophysics of number arise from resource-limited spatial memory

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Metaphors Embedded in Chinese Characters Bridge Dissimilar Concepts

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PRESENTATIONS

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