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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 &lt; .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 &lt; .01), which suggests that implicit knowledge may be more useful for prediction.

CogSci 2023

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

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**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!<br><br>

**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**

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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


CogSci 2021

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.

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.

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!

<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/)
<br><br>

#### **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.

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.

Multimodal Person Evaluation: First Impressions from Faces, Voices, and First Names

In this study, we investigate the priming effect of camera-induced objectifying-gaze, operationalised via sexualised music video(MV), on university students when looking at target female images in traditional (saree, salwar) and western (shirt-pant, short-dress) attires in the Indian demographics. We showed participants two videos where female leads wore unrevealing Indian attire (saree) and revealing western clothing in sexualised and traditional MVs respectively. We quantified gaze as fixation-duration and visit-count (revisit frequency) metrics. Our findings report that there is a priming effect of sexualised media. Female images in all attires are equally objectified and body-biased gaze is more pronounced in sexualised MV priming, short-dress is more objectified in traditional MV priming, and saree is less objectified overall, which confirms the social stereotypes on attire and respectability — traditionally clad (vs. non-traditional) women are seen as more moral and worthy of respect and protection compared to women in hypersexualised and objectified roles.

The Objectifying Gaze: Impact of Sexualized Media on Viewer Gaze Behavior towards (Non)Traditional Attire

Combining perceptual learning techniques with adaptive learning algorithms has been shown to accelerate the development of expertise in medical and STEM learning domains. Virtually all adaptive learning systems have relied on simple accuracy data that does not take into account response bias, a problem that may be especially consequential in multi-category perceptual classifications. We investigated whether adaptive perceptual learning in skin cancer screening can be enhanced by incorporating signal detection theory (SDT) methods that separate sensitivity from criterion. SDT-style concepts were used to alter sequencing, and separately to define mastery (category retirement). SDT retirement used a running d’ estimate calculated from a recent window of trials based on hit and false alarm rates. We used a Skin Cancer PALM (perceptual adaptive learning module) to train classification of 10 cancerous and non-cancerous skin lesion types. Four adaptive conditions varied either the type of adaptive sequencing (standard vs. SDT) or retirement criteria (standard vs. SDT). A control condition presented didactic instruction on dermatologic screening in video form, including images, standard classification schemes, and detailed explanations. All adaptive conditions robustly outperformed the control condition in both learning efficiency and fluency (large effect sizes). Use of SDT retirement criteria produced greater learning efficiency at both immediate and delayed posttests (medium effect sizes). SDT and standard adaptive sequencing did not differ. SDT enhancements to adaptive perceptual learning procedures have potential to enhance learning efficiency.

Connecting Adaptive Perceptual Learning and Signal Detection Theory in Skin Cancer Screening

Scatterplot research has identified factors that impact people’s perception of correlation magnitudes, yet much less is known about how people reason about data represented in scatterplots. We investigated how people make correlational and causal inferences based on scatterplots with and without outliers. In Experiment 1 and 2, participants viewed scatterplots matched in overall correlational magnitude depicted, but half had an outlier. In Experiment 3, the scatterplots in the two conditions were matched in the correlation magnitude depicted by all the dots excluding the outlier. For each scatterplot, participants stated their endorsement for correlational (X and Y change together) and causal statements (X changes Y). Only when outliers further strengthened an already moderate to strong relationship, people endorsed related correlational statements more and showed a stronger causality bias. Altogether we demonstrate that the impact of outliers in scatterplots on visual reasoning depends on the strength of the relationship depicted.

Processing Scatterplots: Impact of Outliers on Correlational and Causal Inferences

How humans visually cluster points is potentially relevant to perception, information visualization, and other areas. However, there are relatively few empirical studies and computational models of this ability. Here, we propose a new competitive clustering_ model that uses neurally plausible mechanisms such as hebbian learning and lateral inhibition. We evaluate its fit to the data from a behavioral study of visual clustering, as well as the fits of two categorization models (the Rational model and SUSTAIN) and $K$-Means. We find that people are highly reliable in their clusterings of the same stimulus on two occasions, suggesting they are using a stable strategy. The models were generally successful at predicting human clusterings and were able to replicate the qualitative performance profile of human reliability over number of points and over cluster structure. The performance of the competitive clustering model motivates further investigation of its computational properties and empirical validity.


Models of human visual clustering

Previous work shows that visual perception of biological motion is supported by a specialized neural system and is distinct from non-biological or mechanical motion. However, there has been no systematic characterization of what construes mechanical motion, especially in the context of complex actions performed by humans and non-human agents like robots. In the present study, we proposed four different methods that disrupt biological motion and investigated to what extent the altered motion stimuli were perceived mechanical by human observers (N=230). The methods manipulated the pattern of motion trajectories, their timing, and the number of the limbs used in the performed actions. The results show that the motion stimuli were found most mechanical when the pattern of the motion trajectory was changed. We also found that as the number of limbs whose motion trajectory was changed increased, the perceived mechanicalness increased.

Visual perception of mechanical motion: A comparison of methods that disrupt biological motion

The McGurk effect is a multisensory phenomenon, an audiovisual illusion that shows how speech sounds may interfere with the visual sense. In case of an incongruency between a speech sound and a human face articulating the speech sound, human interlocutors tend to perceive an audiovisual percept different from the sound percept and the visual percept. For example, if the speech sound is ba and the visual presentation of the articulation is fa, human interlocutors usually perceive a third sound va. What can we learn about audiovisual integration using an avatar face? To what extent do we observe the McGurk effect? The present study reports an empirical investigation that tested the extent of the effect in an avatar face designed for the purpose of the study. Our findings suggest that the fidelity of realistic avatar designs may be evaluated by employing human responses to audiovisual illusions on avatar faces.

Multisensory Integration of Audiovisual Information in Avatar Faces: An Experimental Investigation of McGurk Effect

The new Sans Forgetica (SF) typeface, creates perceptual disfluency through fragmented letters, which make it difficult for readers to use good continuation and perceptual completion to identify letters. We compare CRT performance and font legibility ratings when CRT problems are presented in SF or Arial. In Experiment 1, participants rated legibility of both fonts after solving CRT problems. Participants who solved the problems in SF rated Arial to be harder to read than those who solved the problems in Arial, suggesting that after prolonged use of SF, participants viewed Arial as being closer in legibility to SF. In Experiment 2, participants rated legibility of both fonts before and after solving CRT problems. The patterns of legibility ratings were very similar across the Arial and CRT font conditions, suggesting that SF was not a metacognitive cue for difficulty. These legibility ratings help explain the null effects of SF on CRT performance.


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