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The risk–reward correlation refers to a tendency to infer the inverse proportionality between probability of an outcome and the outcome&#39;s magnitude and is considered to reflect the statistical structure of gambling environments. Existing studies have demonstrated this inverse proportionality using numerical probabilities. However, verbal probability phrases can also convey contextual information about uncertainty without numbers, and express contextual information that is not contained by numerical probabilities. Specifically, verbal probabilities have positive and negative directionalities that can attune the listener to the occurrence or non-occurrence of an outcome and consequently, the listener’s decision making. Therefore, this study aimed to examine whether the risk–reward correlation also hold in verbal probability phrases, by conducting two empirical studies in which the participants were asked to estimate the reward values and winning probability of gambles expressed by verbal probability phrases such as “certain” or “impossible.” The results indicate that risk–reward correlation also hold in verbal probability phrases, and that negative probability phrases were associated with the larger rewards than the positive probability phrases.

CogSci 2023

Does “never” implicate a larger reward than “possible”? : Risk–reward correlation in verbal probability phrases

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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#### About

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.

#### Our History 

* **Society Creation**<br>
The Society was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts in 1979. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. 
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* **Conference Creation**<br>
The first conference on cognitive science was held at La Jolla, California in August, 1979, and has occurred annually since then. The proceedings of each conference are published, and those from most years are available through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The annual proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference represent a major source of information on new work and new ideas in the scientific study of thinking. In 1990, the Society, with help from an anonymous donor, established the David Marr Prize for the best student paper at each annual meeting.
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* **Journal Creation**<br>
The Journal, Cognitive Science, began publication in 1976, and is now published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Executive Editor is currently Richard P. Cooper of Birkbeck, University of London, and there are 18 Associate Editors and a 30-member editorial board. It serves as the premier outlet for research reports that intersect two or more disciplines. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society. The Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society voted in late 2006 to found a new journal, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). The Editor in Chief is Wayne Gray, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The journal seeks to fill a niche not occupied by Cognitive Science Journal or other cognitive science journals. Membership in the Society includes a subscription to Cognitive Science and TopiCS. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society.
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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

The risk–reward correlation refers to a tendency to infer the inverse proportionality between probability of an outcome and the outcome's magnitude and is considered to reflect the statistical structure of gambling environments. Existing studies have demonstrated this inverse proportionality using numerical probabilities. However, verbal probability phrases can also convey contextual information about uncertainty without numbers, and express contextual information that is not contained by numerical probabilities. Specifically, verbal probabilities have positive and negative directionalities that can attune the listener to the occurrence or non-occurrence of an outcome and consequently, the listener’s decision making. Therefore, this study aimed to examine whether the risk–reward correlation also hold in verbal probability phrases, by conducting two empirical studies in which the participants were asked to estimate the reward values and winning probability of gambles expressed by verbal probability phrases such as “certain” or “impossible.” The results indicate that risk–reward correlation also hold in verbal probability phrases, and that negative probability phrases were associated with the larger rewards than the positive probability phrases.

poster

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

Join us!

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#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Theories in cognitive science are primarily aimed at explaining human behavior in general, appealing to universal constructs such as perception or attention. When it is considered, modeling of individual differences is typically performed by adapting model parameters. The implicit assumption of this standard approach is that people are relatively similar, employing the same basic cognitive processes in a given problem domain. In this work, we consider a broader evaluation of the way in which people may differ. We evaluate 23 models of risky choice on around 300 individuals, and find that most models---spanning various constructs from heuristic rules and attention to regret and subjective perception---explain the behavior of different subpopulations of individuals. These results may account for part of the difficulty in obtaining a single elegant explanation of behavior in some long-studied domains, and suggest a more serious consideration of individual variability in theory comparisons going forward.

To each their own theory: Exploring the limits of individual differences in decisions under risk

Probability judgments appear to violate basic axioms of probability theory, which seems to contradict with the recent successes of Bayesian models of cognition. To explain these violations, we propose the Quantum Sequential Sampler model, which combines quantum probability for explaining conjunction and disjunction fallacies, and a sequential sampling model that maps subjective quantum probabilities into responses. Our model explains probability judgments by a dynamical process, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in the biggest dataset for probability judgments to-date. Comparing with existing Bayesian models, our model predicts both probability judgments and violations of probability identities better.

Quantum Sequential Sampler: a dynamical model for human probability reasoning and judgments

Social cognition is shaped by cultural and social-psychological contexts. Depending on the social cues displayed, the cognitive processes that emerge during embodied social interactions can vary. This study explored the influence of gender diverse social cues on interpersonal coordination and decision making during dyadic interaction in virtual reality. Participants embodied either a transgender or cisgender avatar and interacted with a transgender confederate (human-controlled virtual agent). Our results suggest that transgender embodied women and men displayed more interpersonal affiliation via their coordination dynamics with the confederate after an explicit gender identity disclosure. Additionally, we found that cognitive flexibility for ambiguous decisions was influenced by attributions of responsibility made toward the confederate.

Embodied Transgender Interactions: Exploring Dyadic Interpersonal Coordination and Decision Making in Virtual Reality

Through training using distorted vision, the perception of the trained limb position is shifted based on visual information. We investigated whether and how such proprioceptive recalibration transfers to untrained limbs. The results of experiments using human-like virtual limbs confirmed that transfer to some limbs occurred. The manner in which the transfer occurred varied according to the participants' body posture and the type of trained limb. When the participants sat, the recalibration transferred from one arm to another arm symmetrically around the body midline. Conversely, in the case of a sitting leg and standing arm, it was directly copied to another leg or arm.

Interlimb Transfer of Proprioceptive Recalibration and Effect of Body Posture

This study aims to investigate whether autistic individuals (e.g., ASD) have consistent or inconsistent age-related changes for recognizing different facial emotions compared to typical ones. Particularly, do facial recognition abilities for different emotions display various developmental trends in both groups? Pictures of six primary facial types (happy, sad, angry, surprised, and confused faces) of real persons were used for 91 ASD patients and 177 normal participants from kindergartens, elementary schools, and colleges to examine the performance of facial emotion. The results showed that, although, in general, normal participants had greater recognition performance as expected, both groups of participants had three distinct categories of development patterns: (1) angry and fear, (2) happy and surprised, and the last, (3) sad and confused. These findings revealed significant theoretical and practical values for further research and treatment.

The Effects of Age on Facial Recognition of Autisms

Cognitively reappraising a stressful situation—reinterpreting it to alter its emotional impact—is effective for regulating negative emotions. When reappraising, English speakers spontaneously engage in linguistic distancing, using fewer first-person singular pronouns and present-tense verbs. We investigated whether this pattern generalizes to Spanish, a language proposed to offer unique distancing tools. Spanish and English bilinguals and English monolinguals (N = 163) transcribed their thoughts while responding naturally to negative images or reappraising them (for bilinguals, in both languages). We found that reappraisal increased standard markers of linguistic distancing similarly in English and Spanish. Moreover, stronger linguistic distancing when reappraising in either language was associated with greater reduction in self-reported negative affect. Notably, bilinguals did not utilize Spanish-specific distancing words (e.g., "estar" and diminutives) when reappraising. In showing that English-derived linguistic signatures of emotion regulation extend to Spanish, our findings offer initial evidence that linguistic distancing reflects emotional well-being across languages.

Linguistic Distancing and Emotion Regulation in English and Spanish

The current study examined the influence of emoji-conveyed positivity on lexical processing. Two separate online lexical decision tasks (LDT) were conducted, in which neutral words were primed by positive or negative emojis. The results revealed a significant positivity facilitation effect on the lexical processing of the following neutral words, demonstrating that the integration of affective information from the prime (e.g. positive emoji) can impact the processing of the unrelated target (e.g. neutral word). These findings suggest that emoji-induced positivity bias in lexical processing occurs independently of the emoji's visual appearance (i.e. whether or not it is a face), suggesting that the positivity bias results from the emotional processing and interaction between lexical and affective processes, rather than the semantic richness of emotional stimuli. The practical implications of these results indicate the potential effectiveness of emoji-conveyed positivity in reading and highlight the importance of controlling for emotional content in similar reading studies. Future research should investigate the effects of emojis on sentence and discourse processing.

More Than Mere Words: Emoji-Induced Positivity Bias in Lexical Processing

Prior literature provides contradictory claims on the differences in preferential processing among different emotional stimuli. While some studies have indicated that happy faces
are processed more effectively than others, Simione et al. (2014) demonstrated that when processing resources are limited, there is threat superiority in VSTM. Given the contrasting claims about angry vs. happy faces, we did a modified replication of the same study using real faces instead of schematic faces. We hypothesized that happy emotional expression would show better performance and conducted two experiments manipulating display times in experiment 1 and set sizes in experiment 2. We found a general "emotional superiority" effect and a ”happiness superiority” effect in both experiments, which contrasts with Simione et al. (2014)’s results. These findings indicate that a happy face gets attentional priority for storage in the VSTM. Theories of consolidation and processing in visual short-term memory need to incorporate such stimulus saliency-based processing differences.

Preference for Happy Faces in Emotion-based Attentional Priority in Visual Short Term Memory

Video gaming and competitive eSports have garnered increased empirical attention, although a knowledge gap persists concerning the cognitive underpinnings of performance in individual gaming genres. Like traditional sports players, eSports players require genre-specific skillsets that depend upon distinct cognitive constructs to perform well in their genre. We examined the relations between high-level expertise in different eSports and performance on several cognitive assessments to isolate the processes that most directly support top-level competitive gaming performance. Top-level experts of Fighting and Rhythm game genres outperformed Non-video-game-players on measures of reaction time, paced motor timing, and sustained attention. Fighting Game Experts performed particularly well with sustained attention, and Rhythm Game Experts performed particularly well at paced motor timing. Expert groups did not dramatically differ from one another, suggesting relations with more general gaming expertise rather than game-specific expertise. This research provides preliminary explanation for how genre-specific video game expertise interacts with cognition.

Associations Between Cognitive Performance and Extreme Expertise in Different Competitive eSports

Selective avoidance of uncongenial facts to users’ preexisting false belief is a biased click tendency that detracts the utility of fact-checking websites. This study examined the strength of this avoidance tendency and whether it can be reduced with interventions. In a preregistered experiment with 1,203 participants, we compared two different types of interventions: An intervention with instruction that directly calls for reflection via text (instruction intervention); An intervention with a ranking-biased order that induces users to click on what they easily see and vice versa (ranking-biased intervention). The results showed no significant effect of the instruction intervention. However, the ranking-biased intervention showed preventive outcomes regarding the selective avoidance behaviors of users and promoted their clicking on links to uncongenial facts. The ranking-biased intervention was effective for users with high reflexiveness as well as for users with low reflexiveness. We discuss implications for designing fact-checking websites based on user understanding.

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