United States

CogSci 2021

The development of circuits supporting the brain&#39;s representation of space

### Conference Welcome

Welcome to the third Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2021. In the conference, which will be held from June 9-11, 2021, about 180 researchers from East Asia, Oceania, Middle East, Europe, North and South America give presentations on their latest research advancing the evolutionary understanding of human and nonhuman animal culture.

### Schedule and Program

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/1ef06ffd05f80957b4a5b685f63ee3ba.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fullprogram.pdf)
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/12285eb22580949635121d15d5b46325.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/abstracts.pdf)

**Program-at-glance**

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/c0d0d4c8fcdad49d12631574fd966ae8.png)

### About the conference 
 
**Help-desk:** 
Please first visit [Help-desk](https://underline.io/events/120/help-desk) where you can find the instructions and manuals for exploring the conference site. 

**Plenary sessions:**
Five leading researchers give a live talk. It is like a TV show. The audience can submit a question from the chat window. Chat messages are immediately delivered to speakers and moderators.

**Q&A sessions (parallel):**
Each presenter first gives a 2-minute live lightning talk followed by an 8-minute live discussion with the audience. It uses Zoom.

**Discussion sessions:** 
The audience can approach presenters and discuss their research. The sessions are held in a dedicated room in Gathertown.
 
**Gathertown:**
It is a platform dedicated to live virtual interactions.
Gather Town is available for all participants 24 hours during the conference.
You can meet and talk with anybody at a lounge or at a table in Gathertown.
Further Gather Town instruction and how to use short keys please find in our [Help desk page](https://underline.io/events/120/help-desk). 

**Videos and slides:**

* Plenary sessions and the Q&A sessions will be recorded and uploaded after the sessions.
* All the videos and slides are available for 60 days after the conference but only to registered ones. 

**Text-based chatting with the speakers:** 
You can chat with any speaker in the Q&A and discussion sessions. A chat window is available on each speaker’s page, and you can leave your questions there. 

**Announcement to the other participants:**
If you want to make an announcement to the other participants (e.g., “Hey, let’s meet at the lounge in Gathertown from 9pm CEST!), please use twitter (#CESConf2021).



### Code of conduct

See the full details of [the code of conduct](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/).
&nbsp; 
 CES is dedicated to providing a welcoming and harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality, or the presence of or care for dependents. 
We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers.

&nbsp;
**Harassment can occur in-person or virtually, and includes, but is not limited to:**
* Comments (verbal, text, etc.) that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality
* Sexual images in public spaces (physical or virtual)
* Deliberate intimidation, stalking, or following
* Harassing photography or recording (including sharing of presentation materials without consent)
* Sustained disruption of talks or other events (including “Zoombombing”)
* Inappropriate physical contact or unwelcome sexual attention
* Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behaviour 

&nbsp;
 **Inclusiveness Committee**:
&nbsp;
 To facilitate implementing the code of conduct and foster a climate of inclusion, we have developed an inclusiveness committee. Below is their contact information:
 **Hiromi Matsumae**:	matsumae.hiromi.g@tokai.ac.jp
 **Patrick Savage**:	psavage@sfc.keio.ac.jp
 **Sarah Mathew**:	Sarah.Mathew@asu.edu
 **Gmail:** inclusivenessCES2021@gmail.com
 See [more details about reporting the harassment.](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/)

### Organizing committee

**Honorary Conference Organizer:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home) 

**Chair:** [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io)

**Scientific Committee:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home), [Yasuo Ihara (the University of Tokyo)](https://researchmap.jp/read0209180?lang=en), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Naoko Matsumoto (Okayama University)](https://researchmap.jp/nmatsumoto_okayama-u), [Masako Myowa (Kyoto University)](https://myowa.educ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en), [Hisashi Nakao (Nanzan University)](https://www.hisashinakao.com/), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)

**Local Organizing Committee:** [Yutaka Horita (Teikyo University)](https://sites.google.com/site/yhoritapage/), [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io/), [Ayaka Takimoto (Hokkaido University)](https://lynx.let.hokudai.ac.jp/~takimoto/), [Kohei Tamura (Tohoku University)](https://researchmap.jp/7000017854)

**Inclusiveness Committee:** [Sarah Mathew (Arizona State University)](https://www.sarahmathew.net/), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)


![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/967110a00d200a6b20d6f4fa6556ba13.png)

For attending the conference, you first need to register and pay fees from [the link here](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/registration/). After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site. After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site

Registration fee

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

The development of circuits supporting the brain's representation of space

symposium

### 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,**
![](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**

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/464h1m3iU68" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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.

Context effects in human spoken language are well-documented and play a central role in the theory of language production. However, the role of context in written language production is far less well understood, even though a considerable proportion of the language produced by many people today is written. Here we analyze the factors predictive of English language typing times in a large, naturalistic corpus from the popular TypeRacer.com website. We find broad consistency with the major documented effects of linguistic context on spoken language production, suggesting potential modality-independence in the cognitive mechanisms underlying language production and/or similar optimization pressures on the production systems in both modalities

On Factors Influencing Typing Time: Analyzing TypeRacer’s Massive Open Access Dataset

Although infants can frequently observe others gathering information, it is an open question whether and how they make sense of such activities since the mental causes and intended effects of these are hidden and underdetermined by the available evidence. We tested the hypothesis that infants possess a naive theory that leads them to grasp the purpose of information-gathering actions when they serve as sub-goals of higher-order instrumental goals. We presented 14-month-old infants with actions that were inefficient with respect to the agent’s instrumental goal but could or could not be justified as information-seeking behavior via this theory. We expected longer looks in the condition where the detour could not be justified and the results were in line with our predictions. While this evidence is compatible with our hypothesis, further studies are in progress to rule out alternative interpretations of our findings.

Infants’ interpretation of information-seeking actions

For a gesture to be successful, observers must recognize its communicative purpose. Are communicators sensitive to this problem and do they try to ease their observer’s inferential burden? We propose that people shape their gestures to help observers easily infer that their movements are meant to communicate. Using computational models of recursive goal inference, we show that this hypothesis predicts that gestures ought to reveal that the movement is inconsistent with the space of non-communicative goals in the environment. In two gesture-design experiments, we find that people spontaneously shape communicative movements in response to the distribution of potential instrumental goals, ensuring that the movement can be easily differentiated from instrumental action. Our results show that people are sensitive to the inferential demands that observers face. As a result, people actively work to help ensure that the goal of their communicative movement is understood.

I Know You Know I’m Signaling: Novel gestures are designed to guide observers’ inferences about communicative goals

To cope with the pandemic, we need first to predict it. How does the human brain model epidemic dynamics? In February and March 2020, we conducted an online diary study, where each participant completed 14 days of predictions about the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic in China. Over 400 Chinese adults participated in our study, spanning a total of 40 days. On the group level, we find participants’ predictions of the ending date of the epidemic are correlated with daily new cases. Modeling analysis shows that participants’ predictions agree with a Gaussian process model that generalizes observed case numbers to the future by similarity-based function learning, but deviate from an ideal epidemic model. On the individual level, we find individuals’ pandemic predictions are correlated with their psychological traits or states, such as future time perspective and negative emotions (anxiety, depression, and stress).

Folk theory of epidemics: insights from a 14-day diary study during COVID-19

Direction giving involves diverse cognitive processes such as creating a mental map, following the desired route and choosing the correct terminology to provide directions efficiently. Many perceived differences have been speculated in the speech of men and women, yet research on spontaneous direction giving differences based on gender is limited. This small-scale qualitative study uses Cognitive Discourse Analysis to investigate whether men and women differ in the frequency of usage of projective terms, cardinal directions, hedges, modal verbs, landmarks, serial orientation measures and distance indicators in route directions. The patterns emerging consistently through the results show that gender plays an important role in the provision of directions. Key results included a utilization of humor by women when direction giving, as well as a higher usage of landmarks and hedges than men. Key results contradicting previous findings showed no usage of cardinal directions by either gender, as well as the serial orientation marker ‘then’ being utilized more by women rather than men.

Just Following Directions! The Effects of Gender on Direction Giving

When people act on objects, their goals can depend on the objects’ intrinsic properties and conventional uses (e.g., using forks, not knives, to eat spaghetti), locations (e.g., clearing the table, regardless of what is on it), or both (eating with the fork next to your plate, not your dining partner’s). For adults, objects’ intrinsic properties matter more than their locations in most action contexts. Whereas 5-month-old infants privilege objects’ intrinsic properties in attributing goals to people reaching for objects, 3-month-old infants do not. Do younger infants fail to view reaching as goal-directed, or are they uncertain which properties of objects are relevant in different contexts? Here we show that 3-month-old infants attribute goals to others’ reaching actions when given information that their actions depend on what, not where, an object is. Our findings suggest that 3-month-old infants can learn about others’ object goals, before they reach for objects themselves.

Open-Minded, Not Naïve: Three-Month-Old Infants Encode Objects as the Goals of Other People’s Reaches

Models of pedagogy highlight the reciprocal reasoning underlying learner-teacher interactions, including that learners' inferences should be shaped by what they believe a teacher knows about them. Yet, little is known about how this influences learning, despite the fact that even young children make rapid inferences about teaching from sparse data. In the current work, six- to eight-year-olds' performance on a picture-matching game was either overestimated, underestimated, or accurately represented by a confederate (the "Teacher"), who then presented three new matching games of varying assessed difficulty (too easy, too hard, just right). A simple model of this problem predicts that while children should follow the recommendation of an accurate Teacher, learners should choose easier games when the Teacher overestimated their abilities, and harder games when she underestimated them. Results from our experiment support these predictions, providing insight into children’s ability to consider teachers’ knowledge when learning from pedagogy.

Do You Know What I Know? Children Use Informants’ Beliefs About Their Abilities to Calibrate Choices During Pedagogy

Different patterns of lines can express different emotions, but the reason for the metaphor has not been fully revealed. Some studies speculate that this may be caused by the motion implied by lines. In order to verify this speculation, this paper conducts an experiment on the relationship between the emotional expression of lines and the motion of lines. We created 87 different patterns of lines and visualized the motion implied by the lines as dynamic effects. The subjects chose descriptors from a list of 29 emotion words for samples. The results show that the test samples can well cover the classical two-dimensional emotional space and the emotional expression of lines is obviously related to their implied motion. The implied motion, compared with the static version, tends to shift towards the positive and high arousal in the emotional space. In addition, the speed of the motion affects emotional arousal.

Is the emotional mapping of lines caused by the motion they imply?

Artifacts – the objects we own, make, and choose – provide a source of rich social information. Adults use people’s artifacts to judge others’ traits, interests, and social affiliations. Here we show that 4-year-old children (N=32) infer others’ shared interests from their artifacts. When asked who had the same interests as a target character, children chose the character with a conceptually similar object to the target’s – an object used for the same activity – over a character with a perceptually similar object. When asked which person had the same arbitrary property (bedtime, birthday, or middle name), children did not systematically select either character, and most often reported that they did not know. Adults (N=32) made similar inferences, but differed in their tendency to use artifacts to infer friendships. Overall, by age 4, children show a sophisticated ability to make selective, warranted inferences about others’ interests based solely on their artifacts.

Children Use Artifacts to Infer Others' Shared Interests

Humans have a remarkable capacity to make intuitive predictions about physical scenes. Recent studies suggest that this capacity recruits a general-purpose “physics engine” that reliably simulates how scenes will unfold. Here, we complicate this picture by introducing knots to the study of intuitive physics. Three experiments reveal that even basic judgments about knots strain human physical reasoning.
Experiment 1-2 presented photographs of simple knots and asked participants to judge each knot’s relative strength. Strikingly, observers reliably ranked weaker knots as strong and stronger knots as weak. Experiment 3 presented photographs of tangled strings and asked participants whether the tangle forms a knot when pulled. When shown a tangle that would not form a knot when pulled taut, subjects were at or near chance discriminating knots from non-knots. These failures challenge the domain-generality of physical reasoning mechanisms, and perhaps suggest that soft-body phenomena recruit different cognitive processes than rigid-body physics.

The development of circuits supporting the brain's representation of space

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The development of circuits supporting the brain's representation of space

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