Netherlands

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

CogSci 2024

Size and community structure affect abstract graph learning

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><br>
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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**<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.

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

Learning interactions to boost human creativity with bandits and GPT-4

While meaning variation in common words across language and culture is well established, only a few studies have explicitly quantified how general such differences are and whether differences reflect slight variations in meaning or could be considered to map onto entirely distinct concepts for different groups. The present study aims to investigate the extent to which common words can be interpreted differently between groups of English-proficient native Chinese speakers and native English speakers. In our study, we conducted a free judgment of associative strength (JAS) task using 42 cue English nouns. Our findings revealed language-specific meanings across all 42 cue words, with strong evidence for language-specific meaning in nearly 95% of nouns. 
To determine whether these words map onto entirely distinct language-specific concepts, we measured conceptual diversity using Latent Profile Analysis (LPA). The results of the LPA showed that nearly 69% of the cue words could be mapped onto more than one concept across all participants. Importantly, language differences were related to conceptual diversity in nearly 64% of words featuring multiple concepts. In sum, our study provides robust evidence of word meanings and conceptual variations among individuals across distinct linguistic and cultural backgrounds, even for common English words.

**Authors:**

Jia Ke: University of Melbourne; Simon De Deyne: University of Melbourne

Conceptual Diversity Across Languages and Cultures: A Study on Common Word Meanings among native English and Chinese speakers.

Some have speculated that higher-order cognitive functions repurpose mechanisms that evolved for perception and action. Expanding on these ideas, we explored whether creativity builds on our ability to strategically navigate through space ('Creativity as Strategic Foraging'). We establish a connection between different types of creative thinking—divergent and convergent—and corresponding spatial search strategies. Participants completed tests of both divergent and convergent creativity. Before each creativity trial, they searched a city map for which we manipulated the search pattern: half the participants searched for multiple dispersed locations, the rest converged repeatedly on a single location. Participants who engaged in divergent spatial search exhibited superior divergent thinking but poorer convergent thinking, while the opposite held true for participants who converged repeatedly on a single location. These findings highlight a targeted association between spatial foraging and creativity, contributing to a deeper understanding of the underpinnings and mechanisms of high-level cognitive processes.

**Authors:**

Soran Malaie: University of California, Merced; Michael Spivey: University of California, Merced; Tyler Marghetis: University of California, Merced

Different Forms of Creativity Are Rooted in Distinctive Evolutionarily-Ancient Foraging Strategies

This study compares creativity test performance in Individual versus Team settings, addressing a gap in research that mostly focuses on individual outcomes. A total of 120 individuals participated in two sessions. The first session involved cognitive assessments, including the Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM), the Creative Reasoning Test (CRT), and the Test for Creative Thinking–Drawing Production (TCT-DP), as well as mood and personality questionnaires. In the second session, participants were assigned to either an Individual or a Team condition (N=3 each), based on and controlling for APM scores. The same assessments, except for the personality questionnaire, were conducted in this second session. In the Team condition, members were encouraged to collaborate in solving the tasks. We tested whether the conditions have a differential effect on the second session performances, particularly on divergent and convergent thinking scores in CRT, and/or on TCT-DP scores and/or on APM scores.

**Authors:**

Zhino Ebrahimi: RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau; Thomas Lachmann: RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau; Saskia Jaarsveld Phd, Dr habil.: Technisc he Universität Kaiserslautern; Kirstin Bergström: University of Kaiserslautern-Landau

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