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How and why do people share opinions online? In research conducted offline, the social identity of the audience is a key factor: whether they are composed of one’s ingroup or outgroup affects what people share and why. Do people behave similarly and for similar reasons online? To test this, we put participants (N = 326) in imaginary forums belonging to their ingroup and outgroup. In each, people selected statements to share, along with reasons for doing so. The results showed a high degree of heterogeneity; people shared nearly all kinds of statements with both audiences, for a variety of reasons. However, there were also consistent patterns. Identity expression was the most common reason for sharing to both audiences, but this led to different things being shared to each. To the ingroup, people preferred to share statements expressing ingroup beliefs, while to the outgroup, they preferred statements expressing universal beliefs.

CogSci 2023

Online communication to the ingroup and the outgroup: the role of identity in the “what” and “why” of information sharing

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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!

<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
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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.

Interpersonal coordination is a key determinant of successful social interaction but is disrupted for people who experience social anxiety. Effective coordination rests on individuals directing their attention toward others, an effect well-documented in previous literature. Yet, little research has considered the concurrent behaviour of interaction partners. Using a novel virtual reality task, we investigated how partner gaze (i.e., direct vs. averted) influenced the emergence of coordination. The results revealed two novel effects: (i) spontaneous coordination was diminished in the averted (cf. direct) gaze condition; (ii) spontaneous coordination was positively related to symptoms of social anxiety, but only when partner gaze was averted. This latter finding contrasts the extant literature and points to a boundary condition of the social anxiety-coordination association (i.e., social distance). More broadly, this work provides further evidence that emergent patterns of interpersonal coordination fluctuate as a function of changes in social context and the behaviour of others.

Investigating the Influence of Partner Gaze on the Relationship Between Interpersonal Coordination and Social Anxiety

This study investigated the impact of refutative elements in others’ comments on accepting fallacious claims about food nutrition. Four types of comments were used, two of which included refutative elements (challenging evidence and deductive process). A multiple regression analysis was conducted with 506 participants’ agreement with the fallacious claim as the dependent variable and the type of comment and their agreement before exposure to the comments as independent variables. The study also considered individual differences such as media literacy, information literacy, cognitive reflection, and interest in and familiarity with the topic. The results showed that presenting comments that challenged the deductive process significantly decreased agreement when participants had higher agreement before exposure. Further analysis of participants with high initial agreement revealed significant effects of all three comment types. A supplemental survey (n=182) suggested that the perceived negativity and usefulness of the comments influenced the participants' agreement.

The Effects of Refutative Elements in Others’ Comments on Accepting Health-Related Fallacious Claims

Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing different goals or objectives, indiscriminate imitation is unlikely to be an effective strategy---the imitator must instead determine who is most useful to copy. There are likely many factors that play into these judgements, depending on context and availability of information. Here we investigate the hypothesis that these decisions involve inferences about other agents' reward functions. We suggest that people preferentially imitate the behavior of others they deem to have similar reward functions to their own. We further argue that these inferences can be made on the basis of very spare or indirect data, by leveraging an inductive bias toward positing the existence of different groups or types of people with similar reward functions, allowing learners to select imitation targets without direct evidence of alignment.

Selective imitation on the basis of reward function similarity

The human brain can quickly organise visually perceived objects into categories. Although previous research has focussed on object and category representations in the brain, it is still unclear how one category of ecological importance, food, is represented in the brain. Here, we used time-resolved multivariate analyses of electroencephalography data to investigate the time-course of food representations in the brain. Our results show that the brain distinguishes between food and non-food items from approximately 84 ms onwards. The neural signal also contained information about the naturalness, the level of transformation, as well as the perceived caloric content of food. In addition, the recorded brain activity predicted the behavioural responses of different groups of participants who participated in one of two tasks: a naturalness food categorisation task and an odd-item-out task on 3 presented food items. Together, our results contribute to our understanding of how the human brain processes visually presented food.

The representational dynamics of food in the human brain

From learning to play video games to using novel tools, humans are able to acquire a variety of complex mappings between their actions and arbitrary outcomes. In addition, once they have learned such mappings, they often have to use them sequentially to achieve goals, i.e., planning. In this work we study how the learning of a novel mapping interacts with planning in the context of grid navigation. In order to do so, we developed a computer-based game where subjects have to move a cursor from start to target locations using the keys of their keyboard. Importantly, to more closely resemble the complexity of the mappings that people acquire in their lives, the cursor movement was determined by a non-trivial rule inspired by the movement of the piece of chess known as the Knight. In Experiment 1, we show that participants were able to improve their performance in our task, though not arriving optimally to the targets in the majority of trials. Additionally, we proposed two computational models where the mapping-learning and planning interaction occurs in the form of an action value computation, and then evaluated their fit to our data. Finally, in Experiment 2, we showed that exposing participants to the mapping component of the task without having to plan, provides a performance improvement when exposed to the full task later. Crucially, this improvement does not occur if subjects are exposed to the planning component of the task prior to doing it fully.


Exploring human learning and planning on grid navigation using arbitrary mappings.

Physical assembly is a difficult planning problem. Humans do it efficiently by breaking large problems into smaller, easier to solve portions. But what governs which portions are chosen? 
We present a computational model that predicts that humans break physical assembly problems down to minimize cognitive costs.
We test this by asking participants to choose which part of a tower they want to build next. 
Participants reliably choose the easier to solve subgoal out of two otherwise similar options. 
Beyond the immediate cognitive cost, participants also consider how difficult the rest of the tower will be to solve.
A model that takes into account near-future cognitive costs best predicts participants' choices.
These findings show that humans can estimate how difficult solving a subgoal will be,
and that they choose subgoals to minimize immediate and future cognitive costs.
These results help explain how humans make efficient use of cognitive resources to solve complex planning problems.

Humans choose visual subgoals to reduce cognitive cost

This study explores eye-markers for sub-categories of cognitive load. Experiments were conducted on 63 participants using Image Sliding Puzzle (ISP). NASA-TLX was administered post task completion as a measure of cognitive load. Total scanning duration, total fixation duration, fixation count and total saccadic duration were found to be significant, which is consistent with pre-existing literature. Next, we investigated whether sub-categories of cognitive load (mental demand, temporal demand, perceived performance, effort, and frustration) can be distinguished by characteristic eye-metrics. Our findings reveal signature eye-markers for specific sub-categories of cognitive load. Further, we explored the link between perceived performance and actual performance and established that mean fixation duration, peak velocity, mean saccadic duration, and skewness in saccadic velocity were significant markers for both objective and subjective markers of performance. To our knowledge this is the first study to compare the task-evoked eye measures for sub-categories of cognitive load.


Estimating Sub-categories of Cognitive Load: An Eye-tracking Study

Active Inference and its accompanying Bayesian Mechanics
(BM) are important psychological and cognitive science theories.
While there is a strong interaction between the theories
and the philosophical realm, it needs to be clarified what its
metaphysical commitments are. We tease out these commitments
while looking from the perspective of the psychology
of goals. We find that Active Inference cannot account for
the dynamic growth of goals, primarily because of its closed
generative model. We trace the reason for this through the
fixed ‘ontological constraint’ of BM to the inherent ‘logic of
machines’ in mechanistic models, grounding finally in the incompatibility
between substance metaphysics, impredicativity,
and emergence. Thus we argue that Active Inference implicitly
presupposes a Substance metaphysics, yielding the theory no
resource to model novelty, growth, and development observed
in human psychology. We briefly sketch a powerful alternative
grounded in process metaphysics to model biological and
cognitive systems.


Active Inference and Psychology of Goals: A study in Substance and Process Metaphysics

People are often confronted with problems whose complexity exceeds their cognitive capacities. To deal with this complexity, individuals and managers can break complex problems down into a series of subgoals. Which subgoals are most effective depends on people's cognitive constraints and the cognitive mechanisms of goal pursuit. This creates an untapped opportunity to derive practical recommendations for which subgoals managers and individuals should set from cognitive models of bounded rationality. To seize this opportunity, we apply the principle of resource rationality to formulate a mathematically precise normative theory of (self-)management by goal-setting. We leverage this theory to computationally derive optimal subgoals from a resource-rational model of human goal pursuit. Finally, we show that the resulting subgoals improve the problem-solving performance of bounded agents and human participants. This constitutes a first step towards grounding prescriptive theories of management and practical recommendations for goal-setting in computational models of the relevant psychological processes and cognitive limitations.


Toward a normative theory of (self-)management by goal-setting

Cumulative culture requires efficient learning mechanisms that can withstand environmental change across generations. We unify two competing theories of the learning mechanism supporting cumulative culture in a common computational framework, distinguishing model-based from model-free social learning. We describe and analyze evolutionary models that explain when and why model-based and model-free social learning are each optimal, and in particular how environmental determines which strategy succeeds. Strikingly, we find that model-based social learning can succeed even in high-volatility environments. These results yield novel predictions concerning cultural variation in social learning mechanisms.


Next from CogSci 2023

Investigating the Influence of Partner Gaze on the Relationship Between Interpersonal Coordination and Social Anxiety

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