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Children’s production of mental state verbs is studied to research their theory of mind and general cognitive development. Desire verbs are a rich resource as children produce them frequently and early in development, with ‘want’ being of the most frequent production. We report on a corpus study of 450+ instances of ‘want’ as gathered from dialogues with children in CHILDES. We describe a novel coding scheme that measures the semantic development of ‘want’ utterances, such as the use of negation, clause type, complement subject, and the semantic type of the complement, in addition to more conventional categories. We report on these features’ frequencies for children aged 2-4. Noteworthy findings suggest that children talk about their own desires most often, but as they grow older, they talk more about others’ desires; they desire more complex objects as they mature; and they primarily use questions to talk about second person desires.

CogSci 2021

Learning how to use the verb ‘want’: A corpus study

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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.

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Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human mental states and characteristics to non-human entities, has been widely demonstrated to be cued automatically by certain bottom-up appearance and behavior features in machines. The potential for top-down effects to influence anthropomorphism remains underexplored—even as most people’s exposure to robots prominently features linguistic descriptions, e.g. in common discourse, public media, and product advertising. The results of this online experiment suggest that top-down linguistic cues increase anthropomorphism of a robot—and that these top-down cues may be as important of an influence as bottom-up cues. Moreover, these results suggest that this increased anthropomorphism is associated with increased unwarranted expectations of the robot’s capabilities and increased moral regard for the robot. As robots and other machines become more integrated into human society, it is more important to understand the extent to which top-down influences matter for our thought, talk, and treatment of robots.

Top-Down Effects on Anthropomorphism of a Robot

Children use accent to categorize speakers as in-group or out-group members (i.e., fellow speakers of language variety X or some other variety). This study tested how much 3- to 5-year-old children (N=159) consider both grammaticality and accent when categorizing speakers. After interacting with a native or non-native experimenter whose speech contained grammatical errors (or not), children completed a cultural categorization task, where they were asked where the experimenter likely grew up (a familiar- or unfamiliar-looking dwelling), as well as a resource allocation task, where children could share stickers with the experimenter. Results showed that children relied primarily on accent when deciding where the experimenter grew up, being more likely to associate native speakers with familiar dwellings than non-native speakers. However, children shared stickers with all speakers equally. The latter result contrasts with previous work using non-interactive paradigms, and may indicate that live interactions foster more favorable perceptions of non-native speakers.

‘Hello! *What your name?’ Children’s evaluations of ungrammatical speakers after live interaction

Space-based and object-based attention studies suggest these selective mechanisms can be involuntarily or voluntarily deployed. We performed two experiments exploring automatic deployment of object-mediated space-based attention. Subjects performed a modified flanker task with targets and distractors presented within the same or different object frames. If object selection occurs automatically, the flanker effect should be larger in the same condition. However, both object frame conditions produced equally large flanker effects within accuracy. Next, we manipulated the observer’s sustained attentional spotlight via an inducer task to determine whether object-mediated space-based selection depends on initial spotlight size. This time, object-based effects emerged only during narrow spotlight conditions. The results from both experiments suggest the deployment of object-based attention may occur when spatial attention is initially focused narrowly, even when such selection is suboptimal. These results add to the existing literature while reconciling previous inconsistent findings of object-based selection.

Suboptimal deployment of object-mediated space-based attention during a flanker task

From age 3-4, children are generally capable of telling stories about a topic free of choice. Over the years their stories become more sophisticated in content and structure, reflecting various aspects of cognitive development. Here we focus on children’s ability to construe characters with increasing levels of mental depth, arguably reflecting socio-cognitive capacities including Theory of Mind. Within our sample of 51 stories told by children aged 4-10, characters range from flat “actors” performing simple actions, to “agents” having basic perceptive, emotional, and intentional capacities, to fully-blown “persons” with complex inner lives. We argue for the underexplored potential of computationally extracted story-internal factors (e.g. lexical/syntactic complexity) in explaining variance in character depth, as opposed to story-external factors (e.g. age, socioeconomic status) on which existing work has focused. We show that especially lexical richness explains variance in character depth, and this effect is larger than and not moderated by age.

Modelling Characters’ Mental Depth in Stories Told by Children Aged 4-10

We examine whether development of self-awareness influences infants’ ability to track and use others’ perspectives to make belief-based action predictions. Based on the altercentric hypothesis (Southgate, 2020), we expect that infants who do not yet have a self-perspective to make more accurate predictions of an agent’s actions on a non-verbal mentalizing task (NVMT) compared to infants who may encode the other’s and their own conflicting perspective. To test this, we presented 18-month-olds, half of whom passed the mirror self-recognition (MSR) task, with a NVMT and used anticipatory looking as a measure of action-based attribution. Contrary to our hypothesis, preliminary findings with 32 infants using the differential looking score, suggest that those who pass the MSR task are more accurate in their anticipatory looking compared to infants who do not pass the MSR task. All other preregistered analyses will be conducted once data collection is complete in June 2021.

The influence of the self-perspective in infant theory of mind

Although the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak varies from time to time, pandemic has affected larger audiences all around the world. Given the increasingly severe measures taken by the authorities, healthcare professionals have experienced positive and negative effects of the events, both personally and vicariously. The main aim is to examine how remembering influences vicarious traumatization and post-traumatic growth in a sample of healthcare workers. We proposed a multiple mediation model testing of distinct roles of stress components (hypervigilance, avoidance, intrusion) on the link between recollective features of remembering and post-traumatic growth, which allows to characterize memory-linked mechanisms underlying the effects of traumatic stress on growth. We demonstrated unique pathways by which remembering influenced traumatic growth. For the links of emotional intensity and imagery with growth, we found full mediation through avoidance and intrusion Individuals recalling events with high emotional intensity and imagery tend to experience more intrusions of trauma, which then resulted in traumatic growth. On the other hand, the opposite pattern was found for avoidance. Emotionally intense and vivid recall of events increased avoidance responses, but high avoidance reduced traumatic growth. With respect to reliving, while the pattern was similar, we found a partial mediation, showing significant role reliving has in supporting traumatic growth.

Recollection & Traumatic Growth: Unique Mediational Pathways Through Traumatic Stress Components

How does the similarity structure of memory influence credit assignment in reinforcement learning? Memory spaces vary in how integrated versus separable their constituent dimensions are, and how clustered versus distributed items are across dimensions. Greater integration may cause people to overattribute value to multiple dimensions, potentially leading to generalization errors. Greater clustering may bias people to attribute value to discrete category-centers (category-based learning) rather than map value continuously across the space (function learning). In this study, subjects complete a value-learning task in which stimuli are sampled from low-dimensional perceptual spaces, and reward is mapped to one dimension. Each space is intended to engender a different degree of integration and clustering in memory, such that effects of memory organization on learning can be probed. Additionally, we investigate how credit assignment on each of these artificial perceptual spaces differs to credit assignment on more complex spaces that define real-world semantic concepts.

Effects of memory organization on credit assignment in human reinforcement learning

In this study, preschool children were tested in a food versus nonfood categorization task. We studied the influence of edibility cues such as food processing (whole versus sliced items) on children’s categorization abilities. We also correlated children’s categorization performance and strategy with their food rejection scores (neophobia). 137 children aged 4-6 years were asked to discriminate foods from nonfoods. Results revealed that food processing features (slicing) afforded edibility, leading to potentially hazardous incorrect categorization. We also found that children’s categorization performance was negatively correlated with their food rejection scores. Moreover, as expected, children with high food rejection scores displayed a more conservative categorization strategy (i.e., categorizing food items as inedible) than children with lower food rejection scores. However, contrary to our expectations, both performance and strategy of less neophobic and picky children were affected by food processing. These children committed dangerous errors, categorizing many nonfood items as food when sliced.

Fatal errors in the food domain: children’s categorization performance and strategy depend on both food processing and neophobic dispositions.

The increased prevalence of “fake news" in recent years makes it important for us to better understand how we decide which information to trust and accept as true. Existing research has identified the important roles of factors such as trust in the source of the information and reading ability. We report on the results of a study on how the style of writing, and specifically the difficulty level of the text providing the information, affects our trust in the information provided. Participants trusted the information more in texts that were more difficult to read, regardless of whether the information presented was correct or incorrect. Regardless of readability, participants trusted paragraphs providing truthful information more than those providing false information. This result has important implications for information on social media platforms, where the source may or may not be readily available and is often not an expert on the topic.

The impact of readability on trust in information

When laypeople decide if a costly intervention is an overreaction or an appropriate response, they likely base those judgments on mental simulation about what could happen, or what would have happened without an intervention. To narrow down from the infinite set of possibilities they could consider, they may engage in a process of sampling. We examine whether judgments of overreaction can be explained by a utility- weighted sampling account from the JDM literature, or a norm- weighted sampling account from the causal judgment literature, both, or neither. Three experiments test whether these judgments are overly influenced by low-risk bad outcomes (utility-weighted sampling), or by what is likely and prescriptively good (norm-weighted sampling). Overall, participants’ judgments indicate that they disregard low-risk bad outcomes, and even when a high-risk outcome is successfully avoided, the intervention is an overreaction. These results favor a norm-weighted sampling account in the specific case of evaluating overreactions.

Learning how to use the verb ‘want’: A corpus study

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