Netherlands

Verbal descriptions of spatial configurations open a window to a specific aspect of visual cognition relevant to the interpretation of topological relations in the visual world. The present study reports an experimental investigation of the production of spatial prepositions by human participants while they verbally described visual stimuli within a stimuli battery commonly utilized in relevant research. The analysis of participants’ eye movements revealed a relationship between the variety of spatial terms in the given language and native speakers’ fixation patterns on the stimuli. A broader spectrum of spatial expressions, describing the same visual scene, is related to longer and more frequent fixations on the stimuli. The findings reflect cognitive processes, as indicated by oculomotor control variables, related to the verbal expression of spatial relationships.

**Authors:**

Cengiz Acarturk: Jagiellonian University; Seyma Nur Ertekin: University of Amsterdam

CogSci 2024

Spatial Term Variety Reflected in Eye Movements on Visual Scenes

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.

Work in psycholinguistics continues to demonstrate new ways in which perspective-taking guides language processing. E.g., recent work shows that, in sentences like “Sophie [told Amanda that]/[asked Amanda if] she likes learning new languages”, readers use perspective reasoning to judge the ambiguous pronoun as near-categorically referring to the subject antecedent in TELL (because Sophie possesses the relevant knowledge) and the object antecedent in ASK (Amanda’s knowledge). Although these patterns demonstrate a robust perspective effect, could they instead arise from shallow lexical cues provided by TELL/ASK? Experiment 1 rules out lexical-cue explanations by showing that preceding context sentences can compel readers to actually reverse the “default” antecedent judgements for TELL/ASK sentences. Experiment 2 further explores the pragmatic basis of perspective-taking in stand-alone sentences by simply varying character information, e.g., “[Susan/Little Susie] asked her mom if she likes blueberries”, where Little Susie (a young child) is less likely to know/remember her food preferences.

**Authors:**

Tiana V. Simovic: University of Toronto; Craig Chambers: University of Toronto

Exploring the flexibility of perspective reasoning: Evidence from pronoun resolution

Do language users predict word forms as readily as they predict semantic features? Previous studies are conflicting, possibly because they did not differentiate between two types of word form relationship: Head and rhyme relationships, sharing onset or offset features with predictable words. Here, we investigated prediction of form and meaning by means of a priming lexical decision task. People read constraining sentences that disconfirmed their expectations, and indicated, at sentence offset, whether a letter string was a word. Targets were predictable but not presented nouns, semantically related nouns, as well as head- and rhyme-related nouns. Unrelated control nouns were also presented. Results showed facilitation for predictable and semantically related words, with no difference between the two. While no effects emerged for rhymes, head-related words showed slowing, indicating suppression of lexical neighbors following prediction of word forms. Our findings align with word recognition models and prediction-by-production models of predictive processing

**Authors:**

Katja Haeuser: Saarland University; Arielle Borovsky: Purdue University

Predictive processing suppresses form-related words with overlapping onsets

We investigate the phenomenon of colexification, where a single wordform is associated with multiple meanings. Previous research on colexificaiton has primarily focused on empirical studies of different properties of the meanings that determine colexification, such as semantic similarity or meaning frequency. Meanwhile, little attention was paid to the wordforms' properties, despite being the original approach advocated by Zipf. Our preregistered study examines whether word length influences word choice for colexification using a novel dyadic communication game (N = 64) and a computational model grounded in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. Contrary to initial predictions, participants did not exhibit a strong preference for efficient colexification (namely colexifying multiple concepts using short words, when long alternatives are available). The results align more closely with a simpler coordination model, where dyads align on a functioning lexical convention with relatively little influence from the efficiency of that convention. Our study highlights the possibility that colexification choices are strongly determined by the pressure for coordination, with weaker influences from semantic similarity or meaning frequency. This is most likely explained by weak pressure for efficiency in our experimental design.

**Authors:**

Alexey Koshevoy: Université Aix-Marseille/CNRS; Isabelle Dautriche: Université Aix-Marseille/CNRS; Olivier Morin: PSL University; Kenny Smith: University of Edinburgh

Coordination, rather than pragmatics, shapes colexification when the pressure for efficiency is low.

A key task in natural language generation (NLG) is Referring Expression Generation (REG), in which a set of properties are selected to describe a target referent. Computational cognitive models of REG typically focus on REG-in-context, where the referring expressions are designed to take into account the conversational context into which they are to be generated. However, in practice, these methods only focus on linguistic context of the text into which they are to be inserted. We argue that to develop robust models of naturalistic human referring, REG will need to move beyond linguistic context, and account for cognitive and environmental context as well. That is, we propose that a cognitivist, interactionist, and situated approach to modeling REG is needed. In this paper, we present GAIA, a Givenness Hierarchy theoretic model of REG, and demonstrate the immediate qualitative benefits of this model over the traditional REG model which it extends.

**Authors:**

Mark Higger: Colorado School of Mines; Tom Williams: Colorado School of Mines

GAIA: A Givenness Hierarchy Theoretic Model of Situated Referring Expression Generation

This study explores how scientific concepts, such as the specific ways that neuroscientists partition the brain into distinct regions, shape scientific investigation. One hundred fifty six undergraduate psychology students completed a science learning task in which they explored the functions of a fictional brain segment by conducting neuroimaging and lesioning experiments on it. We investigated how the partitioning of the segment into regions influenced participants' experimental choices and learning outcomes. We found that participants preferred to explore borders between the regions and overexplored small regions. Accordingly, participants were more successful in discovering the functionally relevant signals when these were located close to the conceptual boundaries. Finally, participants tended to associate a signal with locations within its region rather than locations that straddled region boundaries. This study contributes to understanding how concepts shape neuroscientific investigation.

**Authors:**

Marina Dubova: Indiana University Bloomington; Robert Goldstone: Indiana University

How do brain maps affect neuroscientific investigation? A study with novices

In this paper, we identify two common assumptions underlying popular accounts of group agency. The first assumption is that paradigmatic cases of agency are to be identified with individual organisms, typically human beings. The second assumption is that cognition requires the manipulation of mental representations. Combining these two assumptions generates the status quo account of group agency, namely that a group’s agency ontologically depends upon the mental representations of the individuals that constitute the group. We provide a taxonomy of views about group agency along two axes, each corresponding to the extent to which the view endorses (or rejects) one of these two common assumptions. We believe that none of the standard conceptions of group cognition and agency reject both of these two assumptions. After developing brief arguments against both assumptions, we provide a brief sketch of what an account of group agency that rejects both assumptions might look like.

**Authors:**

Zachary Peck: University of Cincinnati; Anthony Chemero: University of Cincinnati

Questioning Two Common Assumptions concerning Group Agency and Group Cognition

Adults have rich beliefs about child development timelines, and they intuitively react to and interpret children’s behaviors across ages, holding children responsible to moral expectations depending on the case. While children’s mental capacity and its potential can reasonably motivate moral agency attribution, a question remains whether a consistent relation exists between the empirical beliefs about children’s various capacities across ages and the responsibility attribution to their behaviors that manifest the corresponding capacities. Here we tested 240 adults (UK, US) online on their folk developmental and moral beliefs with a set of vignettes that reflect agential control in various domains (motor, inhibitory control, theory of mind, planning, moral evaluation) in several variants of scenarios. We found differences in expectations about how capacities develop. We use mixed modesl to characterize the relation between expecatancy and responsibility attribution, and propose possible influencing mechanisms.

**Authors:**

Junyu Li: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Susanne Hardecker: SRH University of Applied Sciences; Daniel Benjamin Moritz Haun: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Manuel Bohn: Leuphana University Lüneburg

Deriving beliefs about children's moral responsibility from capacity beliefs

People rely on social information from their peers to revise their agency judgments and perceived control. In this study, we examine if personality traits and locus of control beliefs can explain inter-personal variance in how susceptible people are to social influence in relation to their agency judgments. Using Big Five personality traits and Levenson’s Locus of Control measures with a task based on an interactive computer game, we test the hypotheses that (1) participants with higher internal locus of control are less susceptible to social influence, and (2) participants with higher social-external locus of control are more susceptible to social influence. Our findings show that people with higher internal locus of control are less susceptible to social influence and that people with higher social-external locus of control are more susceptible. In addition, we also find that the big five personality trait “agreeableness” can help explain some of the interpersonal variance.

**Authors:**

Mark Wulff Carstensen: Institut Jean-Nicod

Personality Traits, Locus of Control, and Susceptibility to Social Influence in Agency Judgments

Historically the view has dominated that infants are initially egocentric and that the ability to take the perspectives of others is a cognitive achievement only reached later in development. Against this, Southgate (2020) has recently argued that even young infants are able to take the perspective of others and that this perspective is even encoded more strongly than their own perspective. I focus on three elements of Southgate’s proposal: a) children are initially altercentric, b) once they develop a self-awareness they become egocentric and c) early forms of perspective taking do not require perspective understanding. While I agree with c) and the criticism of the assumption that infants must start off being egocentric, I will argue that there is evidence that young children are not predominantly altercentric either. Instead, which perspective is activated is dependent on the situational context. I develop a proposal of this using the mental files framework.

**Authors:**

Julia Wolf: Ruhr University Bochum

Self-Other Perspective Taking and the Development of Perspective Understanding

Several recent contributions to the research on group problem solving suggest that reducing the connectivity between agents in a social network may be epistemically beneficial. This notion stems from the idea that collective problem-solving behavior may benefit from the transient diversity in agents' beliefs due to increased individual exploration decreased social influence and, respectively, higher rates of individual exploration. At the same time, however, lower connectivity hinders the diffusion of good solutions between network members. Our simulation findings shed light on this trade-off. We identify conditions under which the less-is-more effect is likely to manifest. Our findings suggest that a community consisting of semi-isolated groups could provide an answer to the tension between diversity and diffusion.

**Authors:**

Nicolas Jonard: University of Luxembourg; Samuli Reijula: University of Helsinki; Luigi Marengo: LUISS

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