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Helping is an inherently cooperative behavior, but the cognitive mechanisms underlying this behavior remain relatively underexplored. In this paper, we introduce a novel gamified paradigm for understanding a variety of cognitive behaviors associated with helping. Principals are assigned secret goals in a block-based grid (e.g., move all blue blocks to room C), and helpers can either pass their turn or make a move that could help the principal. We show that principals make useful and pragmatic first moves and helpers accumulate evidence over time before initiating a helpful move. We also introduce a preliminary set of computational models based on recursive pragmatic inference and utility maximization that attempt to account for these behavioral findings.


CogSci 2023

Help me help you: A computational model for goal inference and action planning

technical paper

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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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Solving problems with others not only reduces the time required to complete a challenge but may also enable the discovery of novel strategies that qualitatively change how a problem is approached. At the dyadic level, the laboratory-based ‘shepherding task’ demonstrated that, when tasked to contain evasive agents to a centralized location, some participants discover a non-obvious but optimal strategy to solve the task. This paper quantified the interactions between participants engaged in the task using Multidimensional Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (MdCRQA), applied to each participant’s gaze and hand movements. The results demonstrated that strategy discoverers exhibited greater amounts of incidental coupling than non-discoverers prior to discovery. Once discovered, the strategy reduced the strength of coupling between participants, indicating that the strategy also reduced coordination demands. Future work will investigate whether differences in problem-solving can be attributable to differences in the perceptual features participants use which scaffold the discovery of task-optimal solutions.


Incidental Coupling of Perceptual-Motor Behaviors Associated with Solution Insight during Physical Collaborative Problem-Solving

This symposia brings together researchers, with backgrounds in both academia and industry, to discuss how to best foster theory development, basic science, and tackle applied problems.

How should industry influence cognitive science?

Multimodal binding as mereological co-constituency

Spatial reasoning is an inherent aspectof everyday life. For example, spatial reasoning supports young children playing with blocks, older children learning about positioning on a sports field,and adults navigatingwhere they need to go. Spatial reasoning is also a critical aspect of STEM (science, technology, engineering,mathematics,e.g., Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009). For example, chemists imagine molecules rotating to compare structure, and physicistsreason aboutthe influence of invisible forces on magnetic fields. As can be observed in the examples above, there are a wide range of spatial tasks. Spatial reasoning in real-world contexts can be complex and multifaceted(Atit et al., 2020). How individuals engage in spatial reasoning is highly context-specific, influenced by task demands, novelty of task, and prior knowledge (Uttal & Cohen, 2012). Unfortunately, most of what we know about spatial reasoning is driven by psychological research using psychometric tasks designed to isolate specific spatial skills,independent of context (for review see Atitet al.,2020). Without examining variability across contexts, models of spatial reasoning are incomplete and limited in scope (Resnick & Stieff, in press). In this symposium, we willexplore different contexts in which spatial reasoning is learned. In doing so, we will raise theoretical questions around universal aspects of spatial cognition as well as practical considerations, such as how and when spatial learning should be included in education. This work is important because spatial reasoning can be learned and improved (Uttal et al., 2013), and improvements in spatial reasoning causally support improvements in STEM (e.g., Hawes et al., 2022; Sorby, 2009).Although all four talks center on the role of context in spatial learning, the presenters are drawn from different disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives.Mary Hegartywillbegin by characterizingthe disconnect between psychological research in spatial reasoning and the spatial reasoning involved in complex STEM tasks. The next three talks unpack specific everyday STEM contexts where spatial reasoningis learned. Ilyse Resnick will present work in the learning sciences on shared book reading. David Uttal, a cognitive and developmental psychologist, will present on geographic information systems. Tom Lowrie, a mathematics education researcher, will present on the importance of embedded authentic tasks in spatial and STEM learning.

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Help me help you: A computational model for goal inference and action planning

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Incidental Coupling of Perceptual-Motor Behaviors Associated with Solution Insight during Physical Collaborative Problem-Solving

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