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Gestures play a critical role in human-human and human-robot interaction. In task-based contexts, deictic gestures like pointing are particularly important for directing attention to task-relevant entities. While most work on task-based human-human and human-robot dialogue focuses on closed-world domains where all task-relevant entities are known of a priori, recent research has begun to consider open-world tasks, where task-relevant objects may not be known of to the hearer a priori. In open-world tasks, we argue that a more nuanced consideration of gesture is necessary, as interactants are likely to gestures that uniquely bridge traditional gesture categories in order to navigate the open-world dimensions of their task environment. In this work, we explore the types of gestures used in open-world task contexts, and their frequencies of use. Our results suggest a need to rethink the way that gesture analysis is approached in the study of human-human and human-robot interaction.


CogSci 2023

What was and what will be: What gestures are used in open-world task-based referential communication?

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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).

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<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.

Languages vary in the way they categorize semantic domains. Incidentally certain semantic systems appear more often than others across the world. Recent research has shown that the attested variability can be explained as the result of languages being a plurality of optimal solutions to efficiency constraints. However, the question of the prevalence remains open. Assuming that languages are a form of culturally transmitted cognitive technology, the Typological Prevalence Hypothesis proposes that the prevalence of a linguistic system is explained by how cognitively natural it is to learn and use. We aim to formalize and test this hypothesis by proposing an information-theoretic measure of communicative and developmental naturalness applied to color typology. While controlling for phylogenetic relatedness, we find that communicative naturalness is a better predictor of typological prevalence than developmental naturalness.

A Colorful Formalization the Typological Prevalence Hypothesis

By the preschool age, children develop a strong understanding of norms, fairness, and inequality. However, little is known about the social mechanisms underlying these developments; a gap we hope to bridge. We explored how parenting styles and beliefs in agency affect children's beliefs about inequality. Four-to-eight-year-old children (n=45; target n=80) were exposed to two trials in which they watched a character be disadvantaged either due to poor performance (merit) or a bad decision (self-chosen) and were asked to make a fairness judgment and resource reallocation. We also assessed parenting style and children’s beliefs in free choice/agency. We found that children with authoritative parents gave more stickers to disadvantaged characters and were more likely to think of both inequalities as fair. Additionally, greater belief in free choice correlated with belief in the fairness of both inequalities. Results show how parenting and beliefs in choice impact children’s social cognition.

Authoritative Parenting and Beliefs in Agency Impact Children's Views on Fairness and Inequality

Infant language development is facilitated by social environments and predicted by their parents’ timely responses. However, the increasing uptake in digital technologies raises important questions about how digitally mediated interactions influence parents’ responsiveness. In the present study, the quantity (total numbers of words) and quality (unique words) of parents’ utterances to their infants were examined in contingent (less than 2 seconds) and non-contingent segments across two digital conditions (face-to-face with a tablet present vs. video-chat) during a peekaboo play (N = 67, infants’ age: 18 – 26 months-old). We assessed the lexical variability using a natural language processing (NLP) approach with size-matched random sampling simulation. Preliminary results indicate (1) less lexical diversity was used in non-contingent video-chat and (2) the lexical variability was similar between contingent video-chat and non-contingent while playing peekaboo with a tablet. These findings suggest parents’ timely inputs play a more critical role in video-chat environment.

Lexical diversity in parents’ responses to infants’ vocalisations during peekaboo play across digital media contexts

Biases and stereotypes about social groups emerge from a young age. This study examines whether counterevidence that is statistically representative of the entire group can change children’s attitudes and beliefs about minimally defined social groups. We found that 5- to 6-year-olds and 9- to 10-year-olds’ initial attitudes and beliefs about minimal groups were positive overall, and more positive for the ingroup than the outgroup. Observing a 90% mean sample randomly drawn from the group, or a 10% mean sample in some cases, reduced this positivity for both the ingroup and the outgroup. This work has important implications for combating biases and stereotypes in the real world.

Changing Children’s Intergroup Biases and Social Stereotypes Through Statistical Counterevidence

Over-engaged parenting is on the rise and detrimental to children. However, it is unclear why parents choose to take over and complete developmentally appropriate tasks for their children. Across two preregistered studies, we test the novel hypothesis that parents’ decisions to take over are guided by their beliefs about children's learning. In line with this hypothesis, parents of 4-5-year-olds (N = 77) reported taking over more on tasks from which they believe their child learns less, which was more often the case for non-academic (versus academic) tasks (Study 1). Study 2 found causal evidence for this hypothesis: Increasing parents' (N = 60) beliefs about what their child could learn from doing a novel, non-academic task reduced their taking over actions by half. This work shows that parents take over less when they think that their young child is learning and opens new avenues for interventions to reduce over-engaged parenting.


Parents take over less when they think their young child is learning

During social interactions, we adapt our behavior in anticipation and response to the actions of our partners. This project explores whether anticipating that we are going to do something together also affects how we perceive objects in the world. In 4 Experiments, children and adults estimated the weight of objects when they anticipated that they will be lifted alone and when they thought they would have help. Results showed that the estimated weight of objects varied for adults and children depending on whether they thought they would lift alone or together. Children reliably perceived objects as lighter when they expected help from an adult parent compared to lifting them alone or with the help of a sibling. Parents, in turn, estimated objects would be heavier when they were helping their child. Overall, results suggest that we take into account the costs and benefits of helping another person when acting together.

Costs and Benefits of Helping; How Children and Adults Estimate the Intended Effort of Acting Together

How do young children acquire harmful gender stereotypes? This project tests one potential input: representations of others’ stereotypes. In a pilot study (n=16), 6-8 year-olds learned about a classroom with engineering games and story games. Children were shown four teacher-student pairs and for each were told that the teacher chose the game that the teacher thought a girl or boy student would like more. In line with gender-stereotypical reasoning, participants were more likely to predict that the teacher gave the engineering game to boys (68.75%) than to girls (28.13%, p = .031). Ongoing work is testing whether children make these same predictions when they, but not the teacher, know the students’ non-stereotypical interests (e.g., when a boy student likes stories over engineering), and how their responses are related to their own stereotypes. So far, this work suggests that young children expect adults to hold harmful gender stereotypes.

Children’s representations of others’ gender biases

Research suggests that perspective-taking in children is associated with greater cognitive and emotion understanding as well as parent use of mental state language—words concerning inner mental states or feelings. However, prior research shows conflicting results on which categories of mental state language—cognition (e.g., think, know), emotion (e.g., happy), or desire (e.g., want)—facilitate children’s perspective-taking. The current study examines the relationship between parent mental state language and children’s perspective-taking.

We are coding parent mental state language categories from a wordless book task with two-year-old children and assessing children’s perspective-taking using a card task (Flavell et al., 1981). Preliminary results (N=7, planned 41) show that, on average, parents use more cognition words per session than emotion and desire words and, on average, children score at chance on the perspective-taking task. Differences between mental state categories on children’s perspective-taking skills as well as individual variability will be analyzed.

The association between types of caregiver mental state language and toddler perspective-taking

Forgiveness plays a significant role in our everyday social life, and, because of that, it has received an increasing amount of attention in academic research. However, philosophers and psychologists are equally worried by the fact that we still lack an empirically adequate characterization of forgiveness. In this paper, we present two preregistered study in which we explore what ordinary people believe a speaker does when he or she perform the speech act of forgiving by uttering the phrase, “I forgive you”. Experiment 1 uses a vignette-based stimulus to examine what participants believe to change after the victim granted forgiveness to their wrong-doer. In Experiment 2, we apply a linguistic test, the cancellability test, to determine whether participants consider it compatible to forgive the wrong-doer but to still blame them.

“I forgive you!” — Exploring the Impact of Forgiveness on Negative Emotions and Blame

Social biases can negatively impact our sense of belonging, achievement, and social relationships. However, it is unclear what inferential processes underlie how people detect biases. We propose that people infer social biases by positing prior beliefs to account for potential gaps between what someone observed (e.g., seeing you succeed on a challenging task) and how they responded (e.g., recommending you try something easier). We present a computational model formalizing this process, and validate it with two experiments. We find a strong quantitative fit between model predictions and participant judgments across a range of inferences, namely which prior bias the coach held, and even the player's emotional reactions to the coach's actions (i.e., how offended or flattered the player feels). This work bridges computational methods with social psychological research on social biases, by showing how mental state inferences contribute to our ability to rapidly detect biases.

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What was and what will be: What gestures are used in open-world task-based referential communication?

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A Colorful Formalization the Typological Prevalence Hypothesis

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