Netherlands

Imbalances between the brain’s excitatory (E) and inhibitory (I) systems can lead to structural and functional cortical deviances which have been associated with various developmental conditions including autism. However, the developmental trajectory of such EI imbalances across childhood and adolescence as well as its relationship to autism traits is not well understood yet. In this study, we determined a functional measure of the EI balance from resting-state electroencephalogram recordings of 92 autistic and 100 allistic children (6-17 years of age) and related it to behavioral assessments of autism traits and language ability. Our results revealed differential EI trajectories for the autistic compared to the allistic children. Moreover, the EI trajectories related to individual language ability in which elevated excitability in late childhood and early adolescence was linked to decreased listening comprehension. Our findings therefore show that the developmental trajectory of EI balance shares variance with autism trait development.

**Authors:**

Hannah Plueckebaum: University of Kaiserslautern-Landau; Lars Meyer: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences; Ann-Kathrin Beck: University of Kaiserslautern-Landau; Thomas Lachmann: University of Kaiserslautern-Landau; Katharina H. Menn: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain  Sciences

CogSci 2024

The trajectory of the functional excitation-inhibition balance in an autistic and allistic developmental sample

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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#### **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.

Age-related memory decline is a multifaceted and heterogeneous process. Previous studies on working memory and episodic memory have demonstrated that older participants’ memory for spatial item-context bindings drops dramatically, while it is relatively preserved for individual items. Here, we extend this research in two ways: first, we study memory for spatial context not for individual items, but for ordered item sequences, second, we investigate how blocked versus interleaved learning curricula affect item, order and context memory for older versus younger adults. Across two behavioral experiments with 108 younger (18-35 years) and 100 older (over 65 years) adults, we find better memory for item sequences than position sequences and worst performance for combined item-position sequence reports in both age-groups. Notably, age differences followed the same pattern, being least pronounced for sequential item memory and most for combined item-position sequences. Changing the learning curriculum such that either spatial or item sequences repeated across times, rather than occurring in an interleaved fashion, improved memory performance in both age groups, but had a stronger effect on older than younger adults, suggesting that blocked learning curricula can help older adults with reallocation of limited cognitive resources.

**Authors:**

Xiangjuan Ren: Universität Hamburg; Marit Petzka: Universität Hamburg; Nicolas Schuck: Universität Hamburg

Blocked learning curriculum reduces age-related deficits in memory

Social identity and situational information guide how people morally judge others. A journalist is judged differently than a doctor if they expose private information, which may also depend on whether the reason was to prevent a public health crisis vs. for monetary gain. What is less known, is how people decide how much and what type of information (identity vs. situation) is more relevant for them to make a moral judgment. To investigate this, participants received partial information about a case where an agent committed a moral violation. Then, participants could choose whether to incur a cost to get new pieces of information, or to stop collecting information and instead judge the agent’s actions. This study elucidates how people accumulate and use evidence to judge others. Our findings can reveal underlying biases in decision-making and be used to inform legal and criminal proceedings, news coverage strategies, and others.

**Authors:**

Deborah Cesarini: Duke University; Jade Terry: Duke University

How Does Information Sampling Affect Moral Judgments?

Cognitive graphs represent relationships of learned associations between items or concepts, such as social relationships within a friend group or a network of streets. It is unknown what properties of graphs affect the ability of individuals to mentally represent and navigate these structures. Primary candidates are 1. the number of states (nodes) within a graph, 2. the number of connections among states (edges), and 3. community structure. We independently manipulate these factors to examine how they affect both the ability to identify paths between nodes and the efficiency of paths chosen in abstract graphs (associative networks) of object pictures with no overt spatial properties. Consistent with our hypotheses that changes in graph size, edge number, and community structure impact learning, we observed that these factors affected accuracy and efficiency in reaching targets. The findings demonstrate the influence of graph structure on learning, with implications for both spatial and non-spatial graphs.

**Authors:**

Theodoros Kapogianis: UCI; Aaron Bornstein: University of California, Irvine; Elizabeth Chrastil: UC Irvine

Size and community structure affect abstract graph learning

Peripersonal space (PPS) is the multisensory representation of the near-body space. Several factors modulate PPS size and the sharpness of the boundary separating PPS and the far extrapersonal space, suggesting that PPS may be involved in the subjective experience and in the self-other representation. Such representations seem to be shaped by mindfulness meditation (MM); however, evidence on the effects of MM on PPS is limited. To test the hypothesis that MM modulates both PPS size and the sharpness of PPS boundary, we enrolled 26 non-meditators, who performed an audio-tactile task before and after a 15-minute guided focused attention meditation (FAM). Despite no changes of PPS size, after FAM we found a significantly reduced sharpness of PPS boundary, as if it dissolved. We suggest that the reduced separation between the self and the environment, reported by meditators in some phenomenological studies, may relate to the altered PPS sharpness.

**Authors:**

Riccardo De Pastina: Sapienza University of Rome; Salvatore Gaetano Chiarella: Sapienza University of Rome; Antonino Raffone: Sapienza University of Rome; Luca Simione: Università degli Studi Internazionali

The effects of mindfulness meditation on peripersonal space

In Visual working memory (VWM), the top-down goal selectively maintains and recalls items, while, bottom-up attention induced by perceptually similar items prioritizes recalling these VWM items. In this study, we focussed on whether repeated items have facilitated access in VWM and can also act as task-irrelevant interference hindering recalling task-relevant not-repeated items. In this VWM-based EEG study, human participants (n = 25) responded to a probe for an item’s presence or absence in a memory array containing repeated and not-repeated items. Significantly slower response times and poor accuracy were observed for probe matching for not-repeated items. Also, Event-related spectral perturbation analysis showed an increase in mid-frontal theta (4-7Hz) and parietal alpha power (8-12 Hz) demonstrating that default prioritized repeated items interfere with recalling items corresponding to the not-repeated probe matching. This study shows how default prioritized repeated items; a relational property of stimuli can interfere with recalling task-relevant VWM items.

**Authors:**

Abhishek Singh Narvaria: National Brain Research centre; Dr. Arpan Banerjee: National Brain Research Centre (NBRC); Dipanjan Roy: Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur 

How repetition interferes with access to visual working memory items : An EEG study

How are features and categories of objects represented in the brain? While numerous studies have identified category-specific regions for different categories of objects, the nature of the representation for individual objects remains elusive. We investigated this question by employing representational similarity analysis (Kriegskorte et al., 2006) to identify different types of object information reflected in fMRI activation patterns. Relying on Clarke et al’s (2014) object naming data, we conducted a searchlight mapping analysis to assess whether the object dissimilarity predicted by various theoretical models of object categories and features corresponded to the dissimilarity defined by fMRI activity patterns. The object feature models we contrasted were based on three different sets of feature norms: (a) norming data we obtained from a dataset of 78,000 features produced by 100 participants for a set of 260 pictures (Antal et al., 2024), (b) the CLSB word feature norms (Devereux et al., 2014), and (c) McRae et al’s (2005) word feature norms. Results will address the contribution of feature information to the representation of different object categories.

**Authors:**

Caitlyn Antal: McGill University; Roberto G. de Almeida: Concordia University; Christopher Steele: Concordia University; Brendan Johns: McGill University

Object concepts in the brain: A representational similarity analysis of features and categories

Autobiographical memory arises from an integration of memories with the self-model, which means that the recall of one’s past needs to be congruent with one’s self-model. Memories invoking self-incongruent emotions pose a particular challenge for maintaining a stable and positive self-image, which makes them a good target for research into processes of self-memory integration.
Expanding on our previous research, we developed an fMRI paradigm that uses subject-specific recalls of shameful episodes from the past, compared with neural and fearful episodes as control conditions, in order to identify the neural correlates of self-incongruent episodes. To this end, we employ multivariate methods (representational similarity analysis) to compare neural activation patterns of natural images associated with the autobiographical episodes. We expect higher similarity for items associated with the incongruent (shameful) episode in areas previously connected with self-related processes.

**Authors:**

Alicja M. Wicher: Ruhr University Bochum; Nikolai Axmacher: Ruhr University Bochum

Investigating autobiographical memory through the lens of self-incongruent shameful memories.

One well-known prediction of linguistic relativity theories is
the effect of a noun’s grammatical gender on its semantics;
for instance, ”key” is feminine in Spanish but masculine in
German and thus might be associated with feminine traits for
Spanish speakers but with masculine traits for German speak-
ers. Experimental and corpus evidence for these effects has
been mixed. In this work, we considered a distributional se-
mantics account of putative grammatical gender effects on se-
mantics and tested its predictions in Spanish, German, and En-
glish (control). In Part 1, we hypothesized that grammatical
gender of concrete nouns affects the similarity of noun em-
beddings to embeddings of adjectives semantically associated
with men or with women. We found support for this hypoth-
esis, showing that nouns with the same meaning but with op-
posite genders in Spanish and German show opposite attrac-
tion effects both for words ”man” and ”woman” and for ad-
jectives associated with men and women (although the effect
size was weaker for German than for Spanish). In Part 2, we
asked whether people systematically choose adjectives associ-
ated with women for grammatically feminine nouns and adjec-
tives associated with men for grammatically masculine nouns.
In a forced choice noun-adjective matching experiment (432
participants total), we found predicted grammatical gender ef-
fects for Spanish but not for German. Cosine similarity be-
tween the noun and the adjectives significantly predicted trial-
level responses in all 3 languages; however, Spanish showed
an additional effect of the noun’s grammatical gender, indicat-
ing that participant noun-adjective associations are not fully
explained by distributional semantics.

**Authors:**

George Rocco Flint: University of California, Berkeley; Anna Ivanova: Georgia Institute of Technology

Testing a Distributional Semantics Account of Grammatical Gender Effects on Semantic Gender Perception

Working memory is widely assumed to underlie multi-step planning, where representations of possible future actions and rewards are iteratively updated before determining a choice.
But most working memory research focuses on a context where stimuli are presented simultaneously and the value of encoding each stimulus is independent of others.
To bridge this gap, we developed a task in which participants sequentially observe the reward at each node in a decision tree before selecting a path that maximizes cumulative rewards. We characterize the optimal encoding and maintenance strategy for this task, which trades off the cost of storing information with the potential benefit of informing later choices. The model encodes rewards in choice-relevant paths more often, in particular, rewards on the best and (to a lesser extent) worst paths. Our participants show the same pattern in the accuracy of their explicit recall. Our study thus establishes an empirical and theoretical foundation for models of how people encode and maintain information while planning.

**Authors:**

Zhuojun Ying: UCSD; Frederick Callaway: New York University; Anastasia Kiyonaga: UC San Diego; Marcelo G Mattar: New York University

Resource-Rational Encoding of Reward Information in Planning

This paper considers how interactions with AI algorithms can boost human creative thought. We employ a psychological task that demonstrates limits on human creativity, namely semantic feature generation: given a concept name, respondents must list as many of its features as possible. Human participants typically produce only a fraction of the features they know before getting ``stuck.'' In experiments with humans and with a large language model (GPT-4), we contrast behavior in the standard task versus a variant in which participants can ask for algorithmically-generated hints. Algorithm choice is administered by a multi-armed bandit whose reward indicates whether the hint helped generating more features. Humans and the AI show similar benefits from hints, and remarkably, bandits learning from AI responses prefer the same prompting strategy as those learning from human behavior. The results suggest that strategies for boosting human creativity via computer interactions can be learned by bandits run on groups of simulated participants.

**Authors:**

Ara Vartanian: University of Wisconsin Madison; Xiaoxi Sun: University of Wisconsin Madison; Yun-Shiuan Chuang: University of Wisconsin Madison; Siddharth Suresh: University of Wisconsin-Madison; Jerry Zhu: University of Wisconsin-Madison; Timothy Rogers: UW-Madison

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