Netherlands

People often display essentialist biases, which can lead them to underestimate within-species variability. This bias is especially pronounced when traits are described as advantageous for survival. However, it is unclear whether this bias is limited to the specified trait or encompasses complex trait interactions. We used Markov Chain Monte Carlo with People (MCMCp) to analyze people’s representations of biological variability, using ladybeetles as a model species. Participants either received contextual information about the benefits of ladybeetle color for survival, or survival-irrelevant information.
Overall, participants held consistent beliefs about ladybeetle features, but those with survival-relevant context produced lighter and larger ladybeetles; this difference was consistent with survey responses. However, we found no significant interaction between MCMCp variability and essentialism scores, given our context manipulation. We discuss potential explanations for these results and highlight advantages of MCMCp for assessing biological variability, particularly when studying the development of essentialist biases.

**Authors:**

Pablo Leon Villagra: Brown University; Olympia N. Mathiaparanam: University of Rochester; Karl Rosengren: University of Rochester; Daphna Buchsbaum: Brown University

CogSci 2024

How Red Is a Ladybeetle? Examining People&#39;s Notions of Biological Variability

How Red Is a Ladybeetle? Examining People's Notions of Biological Variability

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.

People learn new words in narrative contexts. Little is known about the potential influence of emotional valence of the text on word learning. In a pre-registered experiment, we investigated whether emotional narrative context shapes word learning. English adults (N = 76) read 30 novel words embedded in 60 short narratives (20 positive, 20 negative, and 20 neutral valence). Post-tests assessed learning (immediate and 24 hours later) and investigated whether there was a transfer of contextual valence to the novel word. Compared to the neutral context, emotional contexts (both positive and negative) facilitated word form learning in the immediate post-tests, but only negative emotion words were recognized better 24 hours later. Furthermore, the valence of the context was reflected in the word meanings participants generated for each novel word. These findings are discussed with reference to theories of embodied cognition and its implications for supporting the learning of abstract concepts.

**Authors:**

Yuzhen Dong: University of Oxford; Matthew HC Mak: University of Warwick; Robert Hepach: University of Oxford; Kate Nation: University of Oxford

The Influence of Emotional Narrative Context on Word Learning

In our study, we address conflicts between individuals and groups, such as cyberbully on social media, as a challenge related to the distinction between the self and others. To address this issue using technology, we propose the concept of introducing facial synchronization in the virtual realm as a means to manipulate the boundary between oneself and others.
We designed an experiment using Cyberball that simulates an ostracism environment, effectively partitioning the boundary between the self and others. This task was conducted in Virtual Reality (VR), with the agent's facial expressions synchronized with those of the participant.
Our findings indicated a reduction in feelings of alienation within the ostracism environment. This discovery has potential implications for communication media, particularly in enhancing interfaces for individuals who may experience exclusionary behavior on social media.

**Authors:**

Ryunosuke Baba: Shizuoka University; Junya Morita: Shizuoka University

Changes of self-others relation by synchronizing facial expressions

Contrary to common intuition, groups of people recalling information together remember less than the same number of individuals recalling alone (i.e., the collaborative inhibition effect). To understand this effect in a free recall task, we build a computational model of collaborative recall in groups, extended from the Context Maintenance and Retrieval (CMR) model which captures how individuals recall information alone (Polyn, Norman, & Kahana, 2009). We propose that in collaborative recall, one not only uses their previous recall as an internal retrieval cue, but also listens to someone else's recall and uses it as an external retrieval cue. Attending to this cue updates the listener's context to be more similar to the context of someone else's recall. Over an existing dataset of individual and collaborative recall in small and large groups (Gates, Suchow, & Griffiths, 2022), we show that our model successfully captures the difference in memory performance between individual recall and collaborative recall across different group sizes from 2 to 16, as well as additional recall patterns such as recency effects and semantic clustering effects. Our model further shows that the contexts of collaborating individuals converge more than the contexts of individuals who recall alone. We discuss contributions of our modeling results in relation to previous accounts of the collaborative inhibition effect.

**Authors:**

Hemali Angne: Rutgers University - New Brunswick; Charlotte Cornell: Rutgers University--New Brunswick; Qiong Zhang: Rutgers University - New Brunswick

Why Two Heads Together are Worse Than Apart: A Context-Based Account of Collaborative Inhibition in Memory Search

In logical theories of meaning, threshold and prototype models are two distinctive formal approaches. In cognitive science
literature, however, where the two models are operationalized,
there is support for the use of a threshold model in categorization (Schmidt, Goodman, Barner, & Tenenbaum, 2009; Ramotowska, Haaf, Van Maanen, & Szymanik, 2022) as well as support for the prototype model (Douven, 2016),(Douven, Wenmackers, Jraissati, & Decock, 2017), and in many cases the
two models are used interchangeably (Kruschke, 2008). We
test for the case of relative gradable adjectives whether a) there
is a difference between predicted degrees of membership from
the two models when relying on explicit reports of threshold
and prototype values, and b) which of the models better predicts behavioral data from categorization tasks. Results suggest that prototype and threshold models are highly predictive
of behaviour in a categorization task and that the two models
yield similar results with a slight advantage of the threshold
model.

**Authors:**

Tamar Johnson: University of Amsterdam; Alexandra Sarafoglou: University of Amsterdam ; Julia M Haaf: University of Potsdam ; Ingmar Visser: University of Amsterdam; Jakub Szymanik: University of Trento

Comparing the Threshold and Prototype Model for Gradable Adjectives

Distributional models (such as neural network language models) have been successfully used to model a wide range of linguistic semantic behaviors. However, they lack a way to distinctly represent different kinds of semantic relations within a single semantic space. Here, we propose that neural network language models can sensibly be interpreted as representing syntagmatic (co-occurrence) relations using their input-output mappings, and as representing paradigmatic (similarity) relations using the similarity of their internal representations. We tested and found support for this hypothesis on four neural network architectures (SRNs, LSTMs, Word2Vec and GPT-2) using a carefully constructed artificial language corpus. Using this corpus, we show that the models display interesting but understandable differences in their ability to represent these two kinds of relationships. This work demonstrates distributional models can simultaneously learn multiple kinds of relationships, and that systematic investigation of these models can lead to a deeper understanding of how they work.

**Authors:**

Jingfeng Zhang: University of Illinois Urbana Champaign; Jon Willits: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Distributional Language Models and the Representation of Multiple Kinds of Semantic Relations

Action descriptions can include or omit various types of information. In this paper, we are interested in the inclusion of manner in verbs. We use the notion of descriptive verbs, first introduced by Snell-Hornby (1983), and hypothesise that the use of descriptive verbs is reliant on having enough context to determine if the descriptive verb is correct and preferred as opposed to a more general non-descriptive verb. We conduct two online experiments in which participants are asked to indicate their preference for a verb after seeing varying amounts of textual and visual context. Our results show that textual context does not contribute to verb choice. However, we find evidence that videos contain information which creates agreement between participants, suggesting there are objective reasons to choose a descriptive or non-descriptive verb.

**Authors:**

Radina Dobreva: University of Edinburgh; Frank Keller: University of Edinburgh; Alexandra Birch: University of Edinburgh

Effects of Context on the Use of Descriptive Verbs

Language comprehension represents a relative strength for individuals with Down syndrome (DS), particularly in vocabulary as opposed to syntax, yet difficulties have been highlighted in areas of pragmatics. Despite issues with recall, studies investigating storytelling report sensitivity to the causal structures of narratives, while poor inferencing skills may be associated with cognitive and expressive deficits. This study investigated inferential abilities in 26 English-speaking adolescents and adults with DS and 24 vocabulary-matched typical controls. Inferencing abilities were assessed through the LITMUS MAIN comprehension task, which targeted understanding of characters’ goals and internal states. Poorer general comprehension scores we observed in DS. This suggests that individuals with DS show deficits in understanding, and potentially expressing inferential information relating to characters mental states. Age, executive functioning and grammar comprehension did not show a significant contribution to comprehension. We consider the role of matching and discuss potential implications for future research

**Authors:**

Elisa Mattiauda: University College London (UCL); Onur Özsoy: Leibniz-Center General Linguistics; Natalia Gagarina: ZAS; Alexandra Perovic: University College London

Inferential abilities in Down syndrome: Examining verbal and nonverbal contributors to narrative comprehension in adolescents and adults

Languages differ in what meanings their lexical items encode: The meaning covered by English 'blue' is famously split into 'sinij' (darkblue) and 'goluboj' (lightblue) in Russian. Recent years have seen novel interest in functional explanations of such variation, pointing to a correlation between greater communicative need of a lexical field and a finer-grained lexical inventory. Here, I develop the position that rather than the mere difference in “need” to mention lexical field, it is the field’s discourse-pragmatic diversity that predicts whether languages “lump” or “split” more. I will demonstrate this with computational techniques and a typologically diverse corpus of spontaneous spoken data from 51 languages (DoReCo), first for the field of verbs of visual perception ('see'-'look'), then on a lexicon-wide level. There are implications: our notions of what a comparable concept is in lexical semantics, what lexical knowledge entails, and the dimensions along which languages differ require re-examining.

**Authors:**

Barend Beekhuizen: University of Toronto

Lexicons encode differently what people do differently. Computational studies of the pragmatic motivations of lexical typology.

Languages vary in the ways they package the conceptual components of motion events into verbs. In a series of experiments, we examined the use of event-general conceptual categories of MANNER and RESULT during verb learning. We tested the accessibility of these concepts within and across domains of spontaneous motion and caused motion events, in speakers of typologically different languages (English and Spanish). Our results indicate that learners can adapt new lexicalization biases that may differ from those present in their own native language, and generalize them to novel instances of the same class of verbs. Furthermore, our data also indicate that under certain contexts, learners can transfer these newly learned biases to a different event domain, suggesting that event-general conceptual categories are psychologically available to learners.

**Authors:**

Sarah Hye-yeon Lee: University of Pennsylvania; Anna Papafragou: Unversity of Pennsylvania

Event-General Conceptual Categories Organize Verb Semantics and Acquisition Cross-linguistically

Conversation requires a substantial amount of coordination between dialogue participants, from managing turn taking to negotiating mutual understanding. Part of this coordination effort surfaces as the reuse of linguistic behaviour across speakers, a process often referred to as alignment. While the presence of linguistic alignment is well documented in the literature, several questions remain open, including the extent to which patterns of reuse across speakers have an impact on the emergence of labelling conventions for novel referents. In this study, we put forward a methodology for automatically detecting shared lemmatised constructions---expressions with a common lexical core used by both speakers within a dialogue---and apply it to a referential communication corpus where participants aim to identify novel objects for which no established labels exist. Our analyses uncover the usage patterns of shared constructions in interaction and reveal that features such as their frequency and the amount of different constructions used for a referent are associated with the degree of object labelling convergence the participants exhibit after social interaction. More generally, the present study shows that automatically detected shared constructions offer a useful level of analysis to investigate the dynamics of reference negotiation in dialogue.

**Authors:**

Esam Ghaleb: University of Amsterdam; Marlou Rasenberg: Meertens Institute; Wim Pouw: Radboud University; Ivan Toni: Radboud University; Judith Holler: Radboud University; Asli Ozyurek: Radboud University; Raquel Fernandez: University of Amsterdam

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