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Musicians and listeners perceive dependency structures between musical events such as chords and keys. Music theory postulates the goal-directedness of such dependencies, which manifests in formal grammar models as right-headed (head-final, left-branching) phrase structure. Goal-directedness has a direct cognitive interpretation; dependencies that point forward in time can be understood as creating expectation, and the empirical correlates of this relationship are a topic of current psychological research.

This study presents a computational grammar model that represents the abstract concept of headedness but does not encode properties specific to music. Bayesian grammar learning is applied to infer a grammar for Jazz and its headedness proportions from a corpus of Jazz-chord sequences. The results show that the inferred grammar is right-headed. A second simulation using artificial data was conducted to verify the correct functionality of the headedness induction. The goal-directedness of Jazz harmony is thus demonstrated to be learnable without music-specific prior knowledge.

CogSci 2021

The Learnability of Goal-directedness in Jazz Music

<center>Louis Stokes Regional Center of Excellence for the Study of STEM Interventions<center>

<CENTER>Translating Critical, Strengths-Based Conceptual Frameworks to STEM Programming Design & Dissemination<CENTER>


 **Sponsored in Partnership by:**
 National Science Foundation, Understanding Interventions, University of Michigan and University of Missouri
 
 
 		
	
Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to the inaugural Louis Stokes Regional Center of Excellence for the Study of STEM Interventions ‎‎(LSCRE ‎‎‎‎SOSI) Summer Institute. SOSI is an NSF funded initiative that reflects a collaboration of STEM and STEM Education Scholars ‎and Program Administrators from the University of Missouri-Columbia, Understanding ‎Interventions, Inc., and the University of Michigan.‎ We offer training and development for STEM program administrators, faculty, and other ‎stakeholders ‎in critical, strengths-based theories and evidence-based practices. Key to our work is providing the tools and avenues for our participants to inform their practice and contribute to the body of translational research that facilitate ‎underrepresented students’ success in STEM. Beyond the Summer Institutes, SOSI, through the Understanding Interventions Index, supports resources for access to the STEM research-to-practice translational literature, a database of journals that publish these works, relevant published measures, and the Understanding Interventions Journal as an outlet for dissemination. This work also extends to webinars and workshops held throughout the year as an integral part of the collaboration between SOSI and its partners. 

This 2021 Summer Institute is designed to address participant needs across a range of experience in our concurrent sessions. Concurrent Sessions 1 are tailored for those of us who have professional training outside the social and behavioral sciences but are looking to develop proficiency, scholarship, and utilize methodologies that test theories like Community Cultural Wealth (CCW), Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) and Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT). Concurrent Sessions 2 are tailored to those with some experience in these areas and are looking to engage more deeply. Some sessions like those that address measures, implementation, and outcomes will be joint. For the current topic sessions, participants will not be limited a specific concurrent session but will have the flexibility to attend the session that they feel most appropriate to their level of experience. 

We look forward to an exciting and productive institute as we all leverage our varied experiences, perspectives, and ideas to this growing community of practice. We would also like to extend our deep gratitude to the National Science Foundation for its generous support of this work.


Best,

SOSI Leadership Team

SOSI Virtual Summer Institute 2021

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### Looking for Cogsci 2023? Please [click here](https://underline.io/events/405/reception) to switch to 2023 edition.


**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.

Strategic decision-making is chiefly studied in behavioral economics using multi-agent games. Decades of empirical research has revealed that emotions play a crucial role in strategic decision-making, calling into question the “emotionless” homo economicus. In this work, we present a unified process-level account of a broad range of empirical findings on the effect of emotions in Prisoner’s Dilemma and Ultimatum games—the two most studied games in behavioral sciences. Under the empirically well-supported assumption that emotions modulate loss aversion, we show that Nobandegani et al.’s (2018) sample-based expected utility model can account for the effect of emotions on: (i) cooperation rate in Prisoner’s Dilemma, and (ii) the rejection rate of unfair offers in the Ultimatum game. We conclude by discussing the implications of our work for emotion research, and for developing a unified process-level account of the role of emotions in strategic decision-making.

Emotions in Games: Toward a Unified Process-Level Account

We investigated the influence of structural properties of previously learned stimuli on Spatial Visual Statistical Learning.
Participants (n=170) were first exposed to a stream of scenes containing only one type of regularity (horizontal or vertical pairs), followed by a stream containing both types of regularities. We found that participants performed above chance for the pairs of the first stream (M=54.7%, SE=1.2, p<0.001, BF=91.89) as well as for the novel type of pair of the second stream (M=55.6%, SE=1.9, p=0.005, BF=4.04), but not for the familiar type of pair of the second stream (M=51.5%, SE=2.0, p=0.465, BF=0.11).
This observed novelty effect indicates an interference between the similarly structured pairs in the first and second stream of scenes, suggesting representational overlap of pairs of the same orientation.

Pre-Training Leads to a Structural Novelty Effect in Spatial Visual Statistical Learning

Cross-linguistically prevalent semantic distinctions are widely assumed to be easier to learn, due to the naturalness of the underlying concepts. Here we propose that pragmatic pressures can also shape this cross-linguistic prevalence, and offer evidence from evidentiality (the encoding of information source). Languages with grammatical evidential systems overwhelmingly encode indirect sources (reported information or hearsay) but very rarely mark direct, visual experience. Conceptually, humans reason naturally about what they see, however, on pragmatic grounds, when encoding a single source, reported information is more informative because it is potentially unreliable and consequently more marked. In two Artificial Language Learning experiments, we directly compared the learnability of two simple evidential systems, each marking only a visual or reportative source. Across experiments, participants learned more easily to mark reportative information sources. Our results provide support for a pragmatic bias that shapes both the cross-linguistic frequency and the learnability of evidential semantic distinctions.

Pragmatic Bias and the Learnability of Semantic Distinctions

Observing gestures facilitate listeners’ comprehension, especially for visual-spatial information. However, people differ in how and to what extent they benefit from gestures depending on their visual-spatial abilities. This study examined whether and how spatial skills (i.e., mental rotation) relate to how much listeners benefit from observing gestures. We tested 51 Turkish-speaking adults’ comprehension of spatial relations when the critical spatial information was provided in three different conditions: (1) only in speech (e.g., saying “right” without making any gesture), (2) both in speech and in gesture (saying “right” and gesturing to the right), and (3) only in gesture (saying “here” and gesturing to the right). We found that mental rotation scores were associated with increased accuracy only for speech + gesture (z = 2.37, p = .02) and the gesture-only conditions (z = 2.13, p = .03). These results suggest that visual-spatial cognitive resources might be important for gesture processing.

Is it for all? Spatial abilities matter in processing gestures during the comprehension of spatial language

Finding adequate representations is an important challenge in solving complex problems. Especially in unfamiliar task domains, initially chosen representations might not cover all of its relevant aspects. I am presenting a theory of representational change based on results from a case study of dyadic problem solving using a spatial transformation task of gradually increasing complexity. This theory proposes that change is driven by expressive limitations of the representational substrates in question. Iconic representations, such as gestures are useful in representing simple objects, but full resemblance soon encounters limits. Metonymic gestures, iconically resembling parts of an object but referring to the whole can extend this scope. By omitting aspects of the problem domain, those partial resemblences can then feed into memory retrieval processes for metaphors bearing no actual similarity to domain objects but to, for instance, such metonymic gestures. Finally, elaborating on such metaphors can open up further representational possibilities.

On the Gradual Construction of Complex Abstract Representations in Spatial Problem Solving

Not every prosocial act is equally praiseworthy. As adults, we tend to evaluate helpers depending on others’ needs; helping someone with a hard task may be more burdensome but also more prosocial than helping someone with an easy task. Despite growing evidence that infants are sensitive to the costs of others’ actions, whether such representations inform their evaluation of prosocial acts remains an open question. Here, we ask whether 16-month-olds’ preference between two helpers is sensitive to task difficulty. Infants preferentially reached for (Exp. 1), and looked at (Exp. 2), an agent who helped someone facing a high-cost task over an agent who helped someone facing a low-cost task. Such preference disappeared when the agents completed the same tasks in a self-serving context. These results suggest that infants use action cost not only to predict and explain others’ behaviors but also to evaluate others in prosocial contexts.

Who Needs More Help? Sixteen-Month-Old Infants Prefer to Look at and Reach for Helpers who Help with Harder Tasks

Metacognitive control is the deliberate manipulation of cognitive states such as attentional control and emotional regulation (Flavell, 1979). Metacognitive control is known to improve with practice to become more skillful, yet the mechanisms for developing metacognitive skills remains unclear. I propose that metacognitive skills can be explained through the skills acquisition model advanced by Fitts and Posner (1967) and Anderson (1982). This account will focus on the process of proceduralization, where declarative task knowledge is converted into procedural knowledge. This model has been well researched in the development of both motor skills and cognitive skills (Ford et al., 2005; Anderson, 2007). To date, the model has not yet been robustly applied to the acquisition of metacognitive skills. As Anderson used an ACT-R model to frame his account of cognitive skills, I will apply an ACT-R model to account for the development of metacognitive skills.

The Proceduralization of Metacognitive Skills

Offloading cognition to external stores is practiced ubiquitously in daily life (e.g., counting on fingers, writing lists), yet is a relatively new area of investigation within cognitive science. Previous experiments have assessed the benefits and downfalls, including participants’ lowered memory for offloaded information that is no longer available (Gardony et al., 2013; Sparrow et al., 2011). In addition, when offloading, individuals appear susceptible to manipulations of their external store (Risko et al., 2019). We report a series of experiments investigating how the perceived reliability of an external store affects individuals’ susceptibility to manipulation of that store. Consistent with previous research, results suggest that the majority of participants do not notice an item inserted into their external store. However, once cued to this event, individuals do become more likely to subsequently notice a manipulation of their external store. Implications of this research for our understanding of distributed memory systems will be discussed.

The Perception of Reduced Reliability in an External Store Reduces Vulnerability to its Manipulation.

Humans readily form musical inference: upon hearing a Blackfoot lullaby, a Korean listener is far more likely to judge the music’s function as “to soothe a baby” than as “for dancing”. Are such inferences driven by experience, or does the mind naturally detect form-function links? We tested this in a large online sample of 2418 children, who were played songs from 70 world cultures and guessed the original behavioral context. Results show that inferences were reliable, with practically no improvement in performance from the youngest (age 3) to oldest (age 12). Moreover, their intuitions tightly correlated with adults’ intuitions about the same songs (𝑁 = 85,068). And both children’s and adults’ intuitions were predictable from a few key musical features of the songs. These results support the existence of universal links between form and function in music, and imply that sensitivity to these links is minimally, if at all, experience-dependent.

Children infer the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs

Recently, the close connection between action and creativity has been gaining attention. However, studies investigating how the body influences creativity are limited. This study proposed the framework for that mechanism called Perception and Action-based Imagination based on studies of creativity and embodied cognition. It suggests that creation proceeds through the cycle of imagination generation based on perceptual information and the acquisition of rich perceptual information through imagination implementation. We conducted an experiment to investigate its validity. We prepared the following three conditions: the participants designed the toy with manipulation of the parts 1) by their bodies. 2) in their mind while seeing the parts. 3) in their mind without seeing the parts. Results showed that in the first condition, high creativity evaluations were obtained, the participants paid more attention to the possibility of part fabrication, and the above condition’s effect was partially explained by the focus of part fabrication.

The Learnability of Goal-directedness in Jazz Music

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Emotions in Games: Toward a Unified Process-Level Account

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