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CogSci 2023

Finding Cause in Failure

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

Curiosity relates to learning and recent work shows robust associations between curiosity and recall of information in adults and children over age 10. The current study tested a similar association in younger children and explored children’s information-seeking behaviors. Children (n=90, 4-10-year-olds) played a free-exploration game in which they clicked shapes to learn different facts about different topics. They then recalled what they remembered learning on the task (recall) and asked questions about what they were curious to know more about (curiosity). We observed a positive association between children’s curiosity and recall of information, even when controlling for amount of information seeking and children’s age. This association was specifically seen for recall without memory cues. There was no association between children’s curiosity and information seeking behavior, and children showed a strong tendency of breadth exploration over exploring in depth with some indication of children beginning to explore depth more with age.


Exploring to learn: Curiosity, breadth and depth of exploration, and recall in young children

Categories simplify the vast number of entities we encounter into equivalence classes, serving as a fundamental block of our cognition. This simplification of information supports our ability to reason about and interact with members of each category. In adulthood, selective attention helps us form categories efficiently by focusing on relevant attributes while filtering out irrelevant information. However, young children tend to encode more attributes than necessary, and this developmental difference is partly due to a prolonged development of selective attention. In the current study, we proposed another important contributor to the development. As shown in three experiments, children prefer information gathering to efficiency, regardless of its value. Experiment 1 revealed that children sample more information than adults even when filtering demands are low. Experiment 2 further supports children's preference for information. And Experiment 3 eliminates alternative explanations, demonstrating that children enjoy gathering information rather than motor actions associated with it.

Driven by Information: Children's Exploration Shapes Their Distributed Attention in Category Learning

Young children acquire a wide range of linguistic and cognitive skills in the first three years of life. Decades of experimental work have established a solid empirical foundation for our understanding of cognitive development. But most experimental studies are limited in statistical power and focus on specific psychological constructs, thus making them unsuitable for describing developmental growth at scale. Here, we turned to meta-analyses of experimental research. We conducted a meta-meta-analysis to consolidate and integrate 23 meta-analyses compiled on MetaLab, a community-augmented meta-analysis platform. We found that most datasets can not meaningfully distinguish different functional forms for developmental change, but in those that could, there is great diversity in the best-fitting functional forms of the age model. We also evaluated the impact of a range of methodological factors. Overall, our work sheds light on the heterogeneous nature of developmental trajectories and the subtle interactions between research methods and experimental outcomes.

A synthesis of early cognitive and language development using (meta-)meta-analysis

Quantitative models of behavior are a fundamental tool in cognitive science. Typically, models are hand-crafted to implement specific cognitive mechanisms. Such "classic" models are interpretable by design, but may provide poor fit to experimental data. Artificial neural networks (ANNs), on the contrary, can fit arbitrary datasets at the cost of opaque mechanisms. Here, we adopt a hybrid approach, combining the predictive power of ANNs with the interpretability of classic models.
We apply this approach to Reinforcement Learning (RL), beginning with classic RL models and replacing their components one-by-one with ANNs. We find that hybrid models can provide similar fit to fully-general ANNs, while retaining the interpretability of classic cognitive models: 
They reveal reward-based learning mechanisms in humans that are strikingly similar to classic RL. They also reveal mechanisms not contained in classic models, including separate reward-blind mechanisms, and the specific memory contents relevant to reward-based and reward-blind mechanisms.

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Finding Cause in Failure

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Exploring to learn: Curiosity, breadth and depth of exploration, and recall in young children

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