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It is impossible, even undesirable, for us to remember everything, thus intentional forgetting is an essential process for cognitive efficiency. Decades of research using an item-method directed forgetting paradigm demonstrate our ability to intentionally forget information. To-be-remembered (R) and to-be-forgotten (F) items are encoded differently, with R items better represented than F items in long-term memory. Consequently, we predicted that the well-established part-list cuing impairment of recall caused by re-exposure of some of the studied items prior to test should be greater when R items rather than F items serve as the part-list cues. We found that, relative to no part-list cues, R items reduced recall performance for the remaining R items, but F items improved recall performance for the remaining F items. We interpret this finding as evidence that F items disrupt the retrieval strategy less than R items do, and propose a context differentiation account.

CogSci 2023

Bringing the Forgotten Back to Life: Providing To-Be-Forgotten Information as Retrieval Cues Improves Memory

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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.

Children often need to rely on other people’s testimony to figure out what happened. One challenge in learning from others is that people can disagree in their interpretations of what happened. The present research examined how children ages 7 to 11 use disagreement to make inferences about past social events. Specifically, when there is no reason to question the reliability of either informant, can children use disagreement to infer that an ambiguous social event occurred? Experiment 1 (N = 52) found that children are indeed more likely to infer that an ambiguous social event occurred after learning that people disagreed (versus agreed) about what happened and that this ability strengthens with age. Experiment 2 (n = 43; data collection ongoing) examines how children make this inference. We predict that children’s ability to reason about what would cause disagreement is critical to make inferences from disagreement about what happened.

Children use disagreement to infer what happened

Metacognition can improve with practice, yet the mechanisms underlying metacognitive skill learning remain unclear, and lack a robust theoretical framework. We propose that metacognitive skill learning can be largely explained by the skill acquisition model advanced by Fitts (1964) and Anderson (2013). While this model has been successful in the domains of motor skill and cognitive skill, it has not yet been applied to metacognitive skill. This novel framework can help to explain metacognitive skill learning, its cognitive underpinnings, and shed light on otherwise unexplainable empirical data.

Metacognitive skill: how it is acquired

We propose and implement a relatively simple computational neural-network model of number comparison. Training on paired comparisons of the integers 1-9 enables the model to efficiently and accurately simulate some fundamental empirical phenomena (distance and ratio effects on accuracy and response time). It also generalizes robustly to more advanced tasks involving multidigit integers, negative numbers, and decimal numbers. The work demonstrates that small neural networks can sometimes efficiently learn a powerful system that exhibits extremely robust generalization to untrained items. Some important alternate models of number comparison are considered to establish a broader context. Several predictions and suggestions are made for future empirical and computational research in this area.

A Neural Model of Number Comparison with Robust Generalization

Auditory perception requires categorizing sound sequences, such as speech, into classes, such as syllables. Such categorization depends not only on the sequences’ acoustic waveform, but also on the listener’s sensory uncertainty, any individual sound’s relevance to the task, and learning the temporal statistics of the acoustic environment. Although previous studies have explored the effects of these perceptual and cognitive factors in separation, whether and how their interplay shapes categorization is unknown. Here, we tested this interplay by measuring human participants’ performance on a multi-tone categorization task. Using a Bayesian framework, we found that task-relevant tones contributed more to category choice than task-irrelevant tones, confirming that participants combined information about sensory features with task relevance. Conversely, poor estimates of tones’ task relevance or high sensory uncertainty adversely impacted category choice. Learning temporal statistics of sound category also affected decisions – the magnitude of this effect correlated inversely with participants’ relevance estimates. These results demonstrate that humans differentially weigh sensory uncertainty, task relevance and statistical learning, providing a novel understanding of sensory decision-making under real-life behavioral demands.

The Interplay of Relevance, Sensory Uncertainty and Statistical Learning Influences Auditory Categorization

Prior work has demonstrated the presence of hysteresis effects in the control of affordance-guided behavior, in that behavioral transitions around a critical action boundary vary with directions of change in said action boundary. To date, research on this topic has overlooked the influence of the global context on these phenomena. We employ an affordance-based reaching task, whereby participants were asked to move a target to a goal by passing through one of two apertures (size variable or size constant). It was found that the direction of change in the size of the variable aperture influenced the point of behavioral transitions, and this effect interacted with the location of a proceeding goal. In addition, we considered fluctuations in the entropy of participants’ reach trajectories as a window into the nature of the behavioral phase transitions. Differences in the structure of entropy were found depending on the direction of change in the size variable aperture. These results are discussed considering a dynamical systems approach, and recommendations for future work are made. 

Keywords: affordances, decision making, self-organization, behavioral transitions

Moving the Goalposts: The Influence of Context on Behavioral Transitions in a Unilateral Manual Reaching Task

Social media use has changed how people relate to one another in fundamental ways. Amongst other innovations, the widespread use of image filters has allowed for people to change how they want to be perceived by other users by altering the shape of their bodies to fit current beauty ideals. Research on this area has focused primarily on the social factors that shape filter use in adolescent women. This study investigates the early cognitive processing of filtered images; mainly whether young adults can detect the presence of filters that produce large (Experiment 1) and subtle (Experiment 2) body modifications to either approach of distance it from beauty ideals prevalent for each gender. Results showed that both men and women can readily detect the presence of a filter, and they are faster and more accurate in responding to stimuli of their own gender compared to the opposite gender.

The Influence of Beauty Ideals on Instagram Filter Detection in Young Adults

The brain represents acoustic structure in speech and music hierarchically, with lower-order regions processing shorter-timescale information (e.g., syllables, notes) and higher-order regions processing longer timescales (e.g., sentences, musical phrases). However, it is not known to what extent this neural hierarchy reflects differences in cognitive processing of these distinct timescales. In a behavioral experiment, musician and non-musician participants heard naturalistic piano music scrambled at four temporal levels: 1-measure, 2-measure, 8-measure, and fully intact. We found that participants more accurately remembered and predicted musical information within a more intact musical context than a less intact one (p < .001). Stimuli had a consistent timbre and tempo, indicating that listeners were sensitive to tonal and rhythmic structure, which likely boosted their processing of the more intact, cohesive stimuli. Highly-trained musicians also outperformed non-musicians only in the memory task (p < .01), which suggests that implicit knowledge may be more useful for prediction.

Disrupting naturalistic temporal structure impacts musical memory, prediction, and segmentation

In assessing the sense of agency (SoA) in the field, researchers are often confronted with the limitations of conventional methods (e.g., retrospectivity, task-disruption). Generally, facial analysis offers a promising possibility to overcome these obstacles by directly collecting objective data in real-time and without any need for contact. This paper examines the applicability of face tracking for SoA assessment by investigating whether facial expressions can be used to derive information about the extent to which users feel in control in interactions with technical systems. In a laboratory experiment (N = 27) based on the dot control task, we manipulated SoA via task difficulty and explored the effects on facial expression patterns. Three action units in the region of the mouth were observed to be characteristic facial indicators of SoA. These findings support the suitability of facial expressions for SoA evaluation as well as the potential of face tracking for monitoring SoA in various practical fields of application (e.g., automated driving).

Are Facial Expressions Predictors for the Sense of Agency in a Dot Control Task?

Multimodal social signals are used when a third person perceives the relationship between multiple people. In this study, in order to determine whether people can detect improvisation played by skilled actors from audio-visual information, improvised and scripted play stimuli were presented online and participants were asked to identify which was the improvised play. Participants (n＝216) were randomly divided into three conditions (Audiovisual, Visual only, and Auditory only) and asked about their confidence level. Results showed significantly higher rate of correct response in Audiovisual and Auditory-only conditions than in Visual-only condition. In addition, examination of the free-text responses revealed that those who answered correctly in the audiovisual condition relied primarily on pauses in conversation to identify. These results suggest that in the performances of skilled actors, an improvisation is manifested in auditory signals as social information, which can be detected from the third person.

An on-line study about recognition of improvisation theatre using audio-visual information

We cannot help but form a first impression every time we meet someone unfamiliar to us. While the existing literature has almost exclusively focused on facial impressions, we know from our everyday experiences that other aspects of a person can also inform the judgements we make. Here, I use a data-driven approach to reveal the underlying structure of first impressions attributed to human voices, first names and those based on multimodal information (face, voice and name). Approximately 40,000 spontaneous descriptors were used to establish the most common first impression traits and Exploratory Factor Analyses revealed a number of fundamental dimensions, capturing judgements of approachability, confidence, and intelligence. Surprisingly, multimodal first impressions were primarily driven by voice cues and this was observed even when the presentation order of the three cues (faces, voices, names) was systematically manipulated, providing evidence for the remarkable role of voices in the formation of first impressions.

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Bringing the Forgotten Back to Life: Providing To-Be-Forgotten Information as Retrieval Cues Improves Memory

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