Netherlands

Counterfactual reasoning is at the centre of human daily life and plays a key role in shaping our moral and social judgments. Its effect on moral judgment in adulthood, such as justifying immoral behavior (e.g., “If you had not left your phone on the table, it would not have been stolen.”), has been studied for years. However, we still know very little about when counterfactual reasoning starts to affect humans&#39; moral judgments. To test this, we examined the effect of better and worse counterfactual alternatives on 5-6-year-olds’ (N = 91) moral and happiness judgments. We found that children judged social exclusion (e.g., a new kid has to play alone while other children play together) as less morally acceptable after imagining how it could have been better (e.g., the new kid and other children at the school could have played all together), but, contrary to past work with adults, they did not justify it after imagining how it could have been even worse (e.g., the other children could have broken the new kid’s toy). However, children’s happiness judgments showed the opposite effect: they reported feeling happier about reality after imagining a worse counterfactual alternative compared to children who only thought about what actually happened.

Keywords: counterfactuals; moral judgment; children; happiness judgment

**Authors:**

Zeynep Genç: University of Kent; Angela Nyhout: University of Kent

CogSci 2024

What If Pascale Had Gone to Another School: The Effect of Counterfactual Alternatives on 5-6-year-olds&#39; Moral and Happiness Judgments

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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#### About

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.

#### Our History 

* **Society Creation**<br>
The Society was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts in 1979. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. 
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* **Conference Creation**<br>
The first conference on cognitive science was held at La Jolla, California in August, 1979, and has occurred annually since then. The proceedings of each conference are published, and those from most years are available through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The annual proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference represent a major source of information on new work and new ideas in the scientific study of thinking. In 1990, the Society, with help from an anonymous donor, established the David Marr Prize for the best student paper at each annual meeting.
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* **Journal Creation**<br>
The Journal, Cognitive Science, began publication in 1976, and is now published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Executive Editor is currently Richard P. Cooper of Birkbeck, University of London, and there are 18 Associate Editors and a 30-member editorial board. It serves as the premier outlet for research reports that intersect two or more disciplines. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society. The Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society voted in late 2006 to found a new journal, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). The Editor in Chief is Wayne Gray, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The journal seeks to fill a niche not occupied by Cognitive Science Journal or other cognitive science journals. Membership in the Society includes a subscription to Cognitive Science and TopiCS. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society.
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#### Code of Conduct

By attending the CogSci 2025 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s **[Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ChPuihLy6jE_BWqfO7J2KKgX35JW2zsM/view?usp=sharing)**.
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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Counterfactual reasoning is at the centre of human daily life and plays a key role in shaping our moral and social judgments. Its effect on moral judgment in adulthood, such as justifying immoral behavior (e.g., “If you had not left your phone on the table, it would not have been stolen.”), has been studied for years. However, we still know very little about when counterfactual reasoning starts to affect humans' moral judgments. To test this, we examined the effect of better and worse counterfactual alternatives on 5-6-year-olds’ (N = 91) moral and happiness judgments. We found that children judged social exclusion (e.g., a new kid has to play alone while other children play together) as less morally acceptable after imagining how it could have been better (e.g., the new kid and other children at the school could have played all together), but, contrary to past work with adults, they did not justify it after imagining how it could have been even worse (e.g., the other children could have broken the new kid’s toy). However, children’s happiness judgments showed the opposite effect: they reported feeling happier about reality after imagining a worse counterfactual alternative compared to children who only thought about what actually happened.

Keywords: counterfactuals; moral judgment; children; happiness judgment

**Authors:**

Zeynep Genç: University of Kent; Angela Nyhout: University of Kent

What If Pascale Had Gone to Another School: The Effect of Counterfactual Alternatives on 5-6-year-olds' Moral and Happiness Judgments

technical paper

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was an in-person meeting held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands at the Postillion Hotel & Conference Centre.

**ON-DEMAND PROGRAM ACCESS AFTER THE CONFERENCE**<br>
Recordings of the invited program are now available. You can access them by clicking on the 'Schedule' icon on the left. Select view by week and navigate to the day and time slot of the recording you wish to view. Click on the time slot to access the recording.

Recordings available (click on each recording to view):

**Thursday, July 25**<br>
0900: [Keynote Speaker Morgan Barense on Enhancing real-world event memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/17997/lecture/99084-dynamics-between-minds-and-the-environment)<br>
1000: [Gleitman Award Winner Isabelle Dautriche on Language Foundations: Insights from acquisition, communication, cognition, and more](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18000/lecture/99085-gleitman-talk)<br>
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1700: [Rumelhart Prize Presentation Speaker Alison Gopnik on Exploit, explore, empower: Three ages and three intelligences](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18028/lecture/99161-rp1-rumelhart-prize-presentation)<br>

**Friday, July 26**<br>
0900: [C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize Keynote Speaker Kia Nobre on Focusing in memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18035/lecture/99162-hp1-c-l-de-carvalho-heineken-prize-keynote-address)<br>
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration)<br>
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1745: [Keynote Speaker Andrea E. Martin on Neural dynamics encode the structure and statistics of language](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18077/lecture/99271-neural-dynamics-encode-the-structure-and-statistics-of-language)<br>

**Saturday, July 27**<br>
0900: [Keynote Speaker Gregor Schöner on How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18083/lecture/99273-dynamics-within-the-mind)<br>
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture)<br>


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
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**The Program Book can be downloaded [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yRVp1cBqRnAbdYi4GXWV_pZeyWNsRquv/view?usp=sharing).**

#### **Letter from the President**

Welcome to the 2024 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Rotterdam! CogSci 2024 brings together a large community of cognitive scientists who have traveled here from around the world, as well as a smaller group of remote presenters. I would like to extend an especially warm welcome to our first-time CogSci meeting attendees, and hope that 
their experience inspires them to join our future meetings for many years to come.

I want to thank this year’s conference co-chairs, Larissa K Samuelson, Stefan Frank, Mariya Toneva, Allyson Mackey, and Eliot Hazeltine, for putting together an amazing series of invited talks and symposia around the theme of Dynamics of Cognition. The co-chairs also deserve credit for handling a record-breaking number of submissions and producing a truly exciting conference program 

Beyond the invited talks and symposia dedicated to this year’s conference theme, I would like to highlight the presentations and events honoring the 
Rumelhart, Elman, Gleitman and C .L . de Carvalho Heineken prize winners, including the Rumelhart reception on Thursday. As you may know, we are recording all of the invited talks and symposia, and all prize-winners’ talks, and will be making this content available after the conference. 

The Cognitive Science Society relies on the volunteer efforts of our Governing Board members who work on matters related to our membership; conference policies; diversity and inclusion, international, and outreach initiatives; prizes and much more. We welcome interest from Society members who would like to become more involved in what we do. The 
Society is deeply grateful to Rick Dale and Andrea Bender, who serve as editors of the two Society journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science respectively. We especially acknowledge our editors’ generosity in donating their stipends each year to D&I and outreach efforts. 

This year’s Annual Meeting depends critically on the support of Marischal De Armond and his team at Podium Conference Specialists: Sharon Zwack, Cendrine De Vis, Sarah-Kate Burke, and Rachel Waller worked tirelessly to secure the venue and handled a multitude of logistical and organizational issues, from arranging coffee breaks and receptions to making sure that a huge number of posters fits comfortably into the available space. Finally, and importantly, I would like to acknowledge the Cognitive Science Society Executive Officer, Erica Wojcik, for managing the complex and ever expanding sphere of our Society’s activities.

I hope you enjoy this year’s meeting and the many different opportunities to engage with the vibrant community of cognitive scientists gathered here. I also hope you get a chance to explore the great city of Rotterdam with its many attractions, museums, restaurants and scenic views. If you’d like to talk more about our Society, or simply want to say hello, please stop by!

![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/3c66d0e21fff30e204df1138ffd15173.jpeg)

**Anna Papafragou**  
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

**CODE OF CONDUCT**<br>
By attending the CogSci 2024 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s [Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-6KkptF0Gn3ZYGJDlpqpwTdImw45Ng0/view?usp=drive_link).

**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY**<br>
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.
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The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Prevailing theories propose that confidence in two-alternative forced-choice decisions is based on the probability that the selected option is correct. However, recent findings from three-alternative tasks suggest that adults’ confidence might irrationally reflect the difference between the probabilities of the best and next-best options only, with other options disregarded. Using a novel probability task (in which participants guess the colour of a ball to be randomly selected from varying distributions) and a uniquely sensitive confidence measure, we investigated metacognition in multi-option decision making in children (N = 97, aged 6-9-years) and adults (N = 51). Contrary to previous findings, children’s and adults’ confidence was primarily explained by the probability of the best option. However, preliminary findings suggest that among older children and adults, additional irrelevant factors also accounted for unique variance in confidence. In some contexts, human confidence might be initially calibrated rationally but increasingly reflect irrational factors over development.

**Authors:**

Cate MacColl: University of Queensland; David K Sewell: The University of Queensland; Jonathan Redshaw: University of Queensland

Developing Irrational Confidence? Metacognition in Probabilistic Decisions with Multiple Alternatives

Humans have increasing opportunities to offload internal cognitive demand, such as by setting reminders to aid future memory performance. Here, we examine how children begin to balance mind and world: weighing up when to offload cognition and when to rely on their unaided capacities. Australian children aged 6 to 9 years (N = 120) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of ‘tokens’ to distribute across trials, which they could use to mark target locations and assist future performance. Following the final search period, children were invited to evaluate and adjust their initial allocation. Results showed that 8- to 9-year-olds prospectively allocated proportionately more tokens to difficult trials, whereas 6- to 7-year-olds did so only in retrospect. Throughout childhood, humans become increasingly adept at balancing internal and external cognition.

**Authors:**

Lily S Dicken: University of Queensland; Thomas Suddendorf: University of Queensland; Adam Bulley: The Behavioural Insights Team; Muireann Irish: The University of Sydney; Jonathan Redshaw: University of Queensland

Children’s Emerging Ability to Balance Internal and External Cognitive Resources

Social interaction plays a key role in children's development of language structure and use. In particular, children must successfully navigate the complex task of coordinating their communicative intents with people around them in early conversations. This study leveraged advanced NLP techniques to analyze a large corpus of child-caregiver conversations in the wild, combining methods for communicative intent inference and for turn contingency evaluation. Key findings include the prevalence of classic adjacency pairs like question-response; caregivers initiated the overwhelming majority of these sequences. We also document new developmental shifts in intent expression and an interesting dissociation between frequency vs. well-coordinated use across the early years of development. This framework offers a new approach to studying language development in its naturalistic, social context.

**Authors:**

Abhishek Agrawal: Aix-Marseille Université; Benoit Favre: Aix-Marseille University; Abdellah Fourtassi: Aix-Marseille University

Analysing Communicative Intent Coordination in Child-Caregiver Interactions

What drives lexical alignment in the context of language emergence? We test the theory that limited context promotes alignment, because individuals cannot make use of iconic mappings between shared meanings and forms. Using a novel referential communication paradigm where participants use pre-recorded gesture videos to communicate, we test different context conditions. We find, unexpectedly, no alignment differences between dyads with shared context and dyads with limited context, even though the former have fewer communicative errors. Importantly, we do observe differences when it comes to the iconic strategies used: less shared context promotes the use of (shared) visual iconicity.

**Authors:**

Katie Mudd: University of Amsterdam; Marieke Schouwstra: University of Amsterdam

Shared context and lexical alignment: an experimental investigation

Despite decades of study, we still know less than we would like 
about the association between joint attention (JA) and language 
acquisition. This is partly because of disagreements on how to 
operationalise JA. In this study, we examine the impact of applying 
two different, influential JA operationalisation schemes to the same 
dataset of child-caregiver interactions, to determine which yields a 
better fit to children’s later vocabulary size. Two coding schemes—
one defining JA in terms of gaze overlap and one in terms of social 
aspects of shared attention—were applied to video-recordings of 
dyadic naturalistic toy-play interactions (N=45). We found that JA 
was predictive of later production vocabulary when operationalised 
as shared focus (study 1), but also that its operationalisation as 
shared social awareness increased its predictive power (study 2). 
Our results emphasise the critical role of methodological choices in 
understanding how and why JA is associated with vocabulary size.

**Authors:**

Jennifer Sander: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Melis Çetinçelik: Max Planck Institute for Pscyholinguistcs; Yayun Zhang: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Caroline F Rowland: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Zara Harmon: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Why does Joint Attention Predict Vocabulary Acquisition? The Answer Depends on What Coding Scheme you Use

Children rapidly learn to use language to effect a variety of communicative acts, such as proposing actions, asking questions, and making promises. While prior work has characterized this development in cross-sectional corpora, these analyses have been unable to comprehensively track individual differences in children's acquisition of communicative acts. We analyzed a longitudinal corpus of parent-child interactions from ages 14 to 58 months. We find that children's repertoires of communicative acts diversify over this period, with stable individual differences in the diversity of children's communicative act repertoires. Further, the diversities of parents' and children's communicative act repertoires are correlated. Children with more diverse communicative act repertoires also have larger vocabularies and use more diverse syntactic frames, suggesting links between discourse development and lexical and syntactic knowledge. Taken together, this work provides new insight into individual trajectories of communicative development and connections between communicative act use and other levels of language structure.

**Authors:**

Claire Augusta Bergey: University of Wisconsin-Madison; Misha E O'Keeffe: University of Wisconsin-Madison; Robert Hawkins: University of Wisconsin-Madison

A longitudinal analysis of children's communicative acts

Dyadic social interaction is a complex coordination task involving a large number of interconnected variables. Previous research has shown that metastability -- persistence for an extended,  but impermanent, period of time in a non-stable state of a system -- can be a useful lens for understanding what makes an interaction successful. However, this framework has thus far only been applied to para-conversational signals like heart rate and prosody -- not to the semantic content of a conversation. Here, we present pink noise analysis of semantic trajectories as a metric for conversational success and apply this technique to a large open conversation dataset. Our results demonstrate that pink noise in a conversation predicts a host of variables representing participants' perception of  conversation quality. These results have implications for optimizing a whole host of difficult dyadic conversations -- like those between political partisans -- and human-computer interactions, with applications for improving large language models' adaptability.

**Authors:**

Kathryn O'Nell: Dartmouth College; Emily S. Finn: Dartmouth College

Pink noise in speakers' semantic synchrony dynamics as a metric of conversation quality

There is considerable debate about the origin, mechanism, and extent of humans’ capacity for recursive mindreading: the ability to represent beliefs about beliefs about beliefs (and so on). Here we quantify the extent to which language exposure could support this ability, using a Large Language Model (LLM) as an operationalization of distributional language knowledge. We replicate and extend O’Grady, et al. (2015)’s finding that humans can mindread up to 7 levels of embedding using both their original method and a stricter measure. In Experiment 2, we find that GPT-3, an LLM, performs comparably to humans up to 4 levels of embedding, but falters on higher levels, despite being near ceiling on 7th-order non-mental control questions. The results suggest that distributional information (and the transformer architecture in particular) can be used to track complex recursive concepts (including mental states), but that human mentalizing likely draws on resources beyond distributional likelihood.

**Authors:**

Cameron R Jones: UC San Diego; Sean Trott: UC San Diego; Benjamin Bergen: UC San Diego

Does reading words help you to read minds? A comparison of humans and LLMs at a recursive mindreading task

Learning traps are false beliefs that entrench themselves by discouraging the exploration required to correct them. In previous lab experiments, these learning traps have proven remarkably difficult to prevent. Here, we investigate whether learning traps remain stable in contexts in which both individual and social learning are possible. In two of our three experiments, we found that learners trapped by a false belief were significantly more likely to escape a learning trap when they were able to observe another decision-maker's choices (without observing their outcomes). However, social learning was not a panacea. Social learning was constrained by the challenge of inferring others' beliefs, and trapped learners struggled to learn from partners with sub-optimal decision rules, even when their partner's choices were informative. Collectively, these results suggest that while social learning can help overcome the limits of individual learning, learning from others comes with its own challenges and limitations.

**Authors:**

Rheza Budiono: New York University; Catherine Hartley: New York University; Todd M Gureckis: New York University

How does social learning affect stable false beliefs?

Disparate impact rules are formally neutral but indirectly discriminate against protected groups (i.e., by targeting a characteristic that is more prevalent in a given group). Because these rules are not obviously malicious, they have been widely enacted to circumvent policies against explicit discrimination. In a series of four experiments, we show that adults and children are sensitive to the moral implications of disparate impact rules. However, we also find that they are more accepting of these rules when strong justification is provided, compared to rules with no justification. Crucially, demographic differences also impact people's judgments of disparate impact rules and their creators. We find that conservatives and those from groups not directly affected by the rule tend to be more accepting of it. By studying people's reasoning about disparate impact rules, this work aims to identify the mechanisms by which these rules may evade detection. Finally, we discuss how these insights may inform the development of interventions that highlight the problematic effects of indirectly discriminatory policies.

**Authors:**

Aarthi Popat: Yale University; Jamie Amemiya: Occidental College; Gail D. Heyman: UC San Diego; Caren M. Walker: University of California San Diego

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