Netherlands

The UN Security Council (UNSC) is entrusted with the responsibility of safeguarding global security. Analyzing the cognitive patterns from UNSC debates helps scholars gain insights into the intricacies of international relations and diplomatic discourse. In this study, our focus lies in the cognitive analysis of debates held within the UNSC. We employ metaphors and their associated concept mappings as a methodological tool to dissect the cognitive nuances present in the debates, spanning from January 1995 to December 2020. To undertake this extensive analysis from a large volume of documents, we leverage MetaPro, a state-of-the-art computational metaphor processing system to obtain the concept mappings of metaphors. We analyze cognitive variations by temporal and geographical variables. We also demonstrate the correlation between metaphor-reflected cognition and diplomatic behavior, and their recursive influence, based on large sample research. Our finding highlights the mutual impacts of metaphorical cognition and voting behavior at the UN.

**Authors:**

Rui Mao: Nanyang Technological University; Tianwei Zhang: Nanyang Technological University; Qian Liu: School of Computer Science and Engineering; Amir Hussain: Edinburgh Napier University; Erik Cambria: NTUsg

CogSci 2024

Unveiling Diplomatic Narratives: Analyzing United Nations Security Council Debates Through Metaphorical Cognition

poster

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** 
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** 
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) 
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) 
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
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) 

**Friday, July 26** 
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) 
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture) 
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture) 
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) 

**Saturday, July 27** 
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) 
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture) 
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


#### **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** 
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** 
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.

Perception Verbs (PVs) can have, besides their literal interpretation that 'X perceives Y', other interpretations depending on context. For example, in narratives we often find contexts where seeing something introduces a new referent, heralds a pivotal event, or compresses redundant information about characters' inner states. We computationally model the emergence of such pragmatic use in children (4-12y) with recent Language Models (LMs). Since LMs are partly trained on narrative corpora and can model coherence in narratives, we assume that a LM can infer whether using a PV is apt in contexts that humans can recognise as having a pragmatic function. We sample PV contexts from ChiSCor, a corpus of Dutch children's freely-told narratives, and use the confidence of LM predictions to identify developmental patterns in pragmatic use of PVs for children of different ages. Simultaneously, our setup allows us to identify types of pragmatic meaning that LMs still struggle with.

**Authors:**

Bram van Dijk: Leiden University; Max van Duijn: Leiden University; Li Kloostra MA: Utrecht University ; Marco Spruit: Leiden University; Barend Beekhuizen: University of Toronto

Modelling Pragmatic Inference in Children's Use of Perception Verbs with Language Models

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in generating linguistically coherent text, sparking discussions about their relevance to understanding human language learnability. However, a significant gap exists between the training data for these models and the linguistic input a child receives. LMs are typically trained on data that is orders of magnitude larger and fundamentally different from child-directed speech (Warstadt & Bowman, 2022; Warstadt et al.,2023; Frank, 2023a). Addressing this discrepancy, our research focuses on training LMs on subsets of a single child’s linguistic input. Previously, Wang, Vong, Kim, and Lake (2023) found that LMs trained in this setting can form syntactic and semantic word clusters and develop sensitivity to certain linguistic phenomena, but they only considered LSTMs and simpler neural networks trained from just one single-child-directed dataset. We build upon previous research by conducting systematic tests on 5 datasets, comprising single and aggregated child data and a web corpus, using six different model architectures, including Transformers, to investigate whether the results of what is learnable from single-child input observed in previous studies are consistent across different model architectures and datasets. We find that models trained on three single-child datasets demonstrate consistent results, underscoring the robustness of forming meaningful syntactic and semantic representations from a subset of linguistic input specific to an individual child.

**Authors:**

Yulu Qin: New York University; Wentao Wang: New York University; Brenden Lake: NYU

A systematic investigation of learnability from single child linguistic input

Humans tend to privilege an intermediate level of categorization, known as the basic level, when categorizing objects that exist in a conceptual hierarchy. Domain experts demonstrate a downward shift in their object categorization behaviour, recruiting subordinate levels in a conceptual hierarchy as readily as conventionally basic categories (Tanaka & Philibert, 2022; Tanaka & Taylor, 1991). Do large language models show similar behavioural changes when prompted to behave in an expert-like way? We test whether GPT-4 with Vision (GPT-4V, OpenAI, 2023a) demonstrates downward shifts using an object naming task and eliciting expert personas using the model’s system prompt. We find evidence of downward shifts when expert system prompts are used, suggesting that expert-like behaviour can be elicited from GPT-4V using prompting. We also find that there is an unpredicted upward shift in areas of non-expertise in some cases. These findings suggest that in the default case, GPT-4V is not a novice: instead, it behaves at default with a median level of expertise, while further expertise can be primed or forgotten through textual prompts. These results open the door for GPT-4V and similar models to be used as tools for studying differences in the behaviour of experts and novices even within the same large language model.

**Authors:**

Cara Su-Yi Leong: New York University; Brenden Lake: NYU

Prompting invokes expert-like downward shifts in GPT-4V's conceptual hierarchies

Large Language Models (LLMs) have captured the world’s attention for their surprisingly sophisticated linguistic abilities, but what they might reveal about human cognition remains unclear. Meanwhile, members of the public routinely share “prompt engineering” tips for eliciting “better” responses from LLMs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. These efforts parallel research on linguistic framing, which shows that subtle linguistic cues shape people’s attitudes and decision-making in a variety of contexts. In this study, we tested whether state-of-the-art LLMs would exhibit similar framing effects as human participants. We adapted a range of linguistic framing stimuli for use with LLMs based on a recently developed taxonomy of framing effects (e.g., lexical, figurative, and grammatical framing). Results revealed that some but not all framing effects replicated with LLMs. These findings have practical applications for interacting with AI systems and inform our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the effects of framing.

**Authors:**

Stephen Flusberg: Vassar College; Kevin J. Holmes: Reed College

Linguistic Framing in Large Language Models

Psychopathology, how we measure it and our conceptualization of its structure, is thought to be well reflected in natural language — an idea known as the Lexical Hypothesis. Recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence provide opportunities to explore this connection quantitatively. Using a Large Language Model, we extracted sentence embeddings for the items of three well validated measures of psychopathology measuring Externalizing (ESI), Internalizing (IDAS), and Personality Disorders (PID-5). We analyzed the semantic relationships between the items in these inventories in an attempt to predict patterns of association between self-report responses in a previously collected sample of participants responding to these measures. Our analysis revealed moderate correlations between the semantic relationships and item-pair response distributions for all three measures. Applying factor analysis to the semantic embeddings, we were able to extract the hierarchical structure of these measures: the inferred structures in some cases reflect similar ones based on psychometric analyses and also shed light on the ways that key dimensions of psychopathology are encoded differentially in modern language models. Our findings align well with the Lexical Hypothesis.

**Authors:**

Maria Martin Lopez: University of California, Berkeley; Keanan Joyner: University of California, Berkeley; Bill Thompson: University of California, Berkeley

Natural Language Semantics Encode Key Dimensions of Psychopathology

Vector embedding spaces are representational structures that can capture both the similarity relationship between items and various other semantic relationships. Current state-of-the-art embedding models can generate embedding vectors for individual words and longer strings of text, enabling the vector space to encode the similarity between entire documents of text. We explored whether semantic relationships besides similarity are represented in this space, focusing on the relationship between arguments and counterarguments as a specific example. While there was not a linear subspace that captured the semantic relationship between an argument and its counterargument, we found that a neural network with a single hidden layer could partially learn the transformation between an argument's embedding vector and the corresponding counterargument's embedding vector. This trained model generalized across three different datasets of arguments, suggesting that the partially learned transformation is applicable to arguments and counterarguments in general, not just tied to the semantic context of the model’s training dataset. This approach has practical applications in designing information retrieval systems for intelligent agents and, potentially, in models of cognition that use vector embedding spaces as a representational structure.

**Authors:**

Cherrie Chang: Vassar College; Josh de Leeuw: Vassar College

Searching for Argument-Counterargument Relationships in Vector Embeddings

An accurate estimation of driver vigilance is crucial for reducing fatigue-related incidents and traffic accidents. Despite advances in the field of fatigue detection, effective utilization of multimodal information remains a major challenge. Additionally, prevalent methodologies predominantly focus on local features, overlooking the importance of global features in this context. To solve the above problems, we propose the deep channel attention transformer (DCAT) model, which can effectively utilize multimodal information and extract local-global features for fatigue detection regression tasks. We first introduce a novel multimodal approach that integrates electroencephalography (EEG) and electrooculogram (EOG) data, capitalizing on their complementary strengths to enhance the understanding and assessment of fatigue states. Then, the DCAT model utilizes multimodal information by extracting local and global features using channel attention and transformer encoder modules, respectively. Our evaluation of the SEED-VIG and SADT public datasets showcases the model's superior performance compared to that of the state-of-the-art baselines.

**Authors:**

Jiahui Pan: South China Normal University; Dehua Lu: South China Normal University

A Deep Channel Attention Transformer for Multimodal EEG-EOG-Based Vigilance Estimation

I formalize the problem of care in the mathematical language of sequential decision-making. Drawing upon insights from developmental psychology, robotics, and computational cognitive modeling, I conceptualize care as a dynamic interplay between the caregiver ('one-caring') and the care recipient ('cared-for'). Caring actions maximize the utility of the cared-for at a future point when they are required to act autonomously. Since this quantity cannot be directly optimized, the focus is on enabling increasing levels of autonomy through environmental shaping, risk reduction, and safe exploration. I distinguish caregiving from helping and teaching by care’s focus on exploration and autonomy that increase capacity over time. In the context of elderly care, the emphasis shifts towards preserving rather than enhancing capacity. Finally, I consider the role of caregiving in the development of moral values and the possibility of artificially intelligent agents that might someday care for us.

**Authors:**

Max Kleiman-Weiner: University of Washington

Computational Principles of Caregiving

Here we present a new Explainable AI (XAI) method to probe the functional partition in AI models by comparing features attended to at different layers with human attention driven by diverse task demands. We applied this method to explain an object detector Yolo-v5s in multi-category and single-category object detection tasks. We found that the model’s neck showed higher similarity to human attention during object detection, indicating a reliance on diagnostic features in the neck, whereas its backbone showed higher similarity to attention during passive viewing, indicating salient local features encoded. With this understanding of its functional partition, using Yolo-v5s as a model for human cognition, our comparative analysis against human attention when providing explanations for object detection revealed that humans attended to a combination of diagnostic and salient features during explaining multi-category general object detection but attended to mainly diagnostic features when explaining single-category human/vehicle detection in driving scenarios.

**Authors:**

Jinhan Zhang: The University of Hong Kong; Guoyang Liu: Shandong University; Yunke Chen: The University of Hong Kong; Antoni B. Chan: City University of Hong Kong; Janet Hsiao: Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Demystify Deep-learning AI for Object Detection using Human Attention Data

Computational models of syntax are predominantly text-based. Here we propose that basic syntax can be modeled directly from raw speech in a fully unsupervised way. We focus on one of the most ubiquitous and elementary properties of syntax--concatenation. We introduce spontaneous concatenation: a phenomenon where convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on acoustic recordings of individual words start generating outputs with two or even three words concatenated without ever accessing data with multiple words in the input. Additionally, networks trained on two words learn to embed words into novel unobserved word combinations. To our knowledge, this is a previously unreported property of CNNs trained on raw speech in the Generative Adversarial Network setting and has implications both for our understanding of how these architectures learn as well as for modeling syntax and its evolution from raw acoustic inputs.

**Authors:**

Gasper Begus: University of California, Berkeley; Thomas Lu: University of California Berkeley; Zili Wang: Iowa State University

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