Netherlands

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&#39; 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

CogSci 2024

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

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

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**
<div style="position:relative;padding-top:0;width:900px;height:500px;"><iframe style="position:absolute;border:none;width:100%;height:100%;left:0;top:0;" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/cble/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>


**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.

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

Diversity versus diffusion in group problem solving

The ability to act purposefully demands formulating intentions in the form of mental representation of actions required to achieve a purpose. Moreover, goal-directed behavior also needs apt control of attentional mechanisms for its completion. Here, by deploying a selective attention task for stimuli presented in intended/unintended orthogonal feature, we attempted to understand the underlying mechanisms of how our intentions to get self-decided outcomes modulate attentional control. Results show a processing advantage for intended outcomes and no disadvantage for unintended or unselected outcomes compared to a neutral outcome. The findings support the role of intention in monitoring and control of action outcomes as suggested by dynamic theory of intention.

**Authors:**

Niteesh Deep Sharma: Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur; Devpriya Kumar: Indian Institute of Technology; Narayanan Srinivasan: Indian Institute of Technology

Your intentions matter! The selection of an orthogonal feature of an intended object influences attentional control.

One hypothesis for the exploration-to-exploitation developmental shift posits that children's heightened exploration can be driven by stimulus perceptual novelty through a bottom-up mechanism. A challenge to test this hypothesis has been the conflation of perceptual novelty and epistemic uncertainty, making it difficult to examine its independent effect. The current study decoupled perceptual novelty and uncertainty to provide new evidence that perceptual novelty alone drives early exploration. Specifically, we conducted two experiments in which children and adults were instructed to collect rewards from different options. Computational modeling was employed to compare children' and adults' exploration strategies. The results revealed that unlike adults, children were more likely to choose the option with perceptual novelty even when it had low reward values and no epistemic uncertainty. However, their novelty-preference attenuated when stimulus perceptual novelty was hidden rather visible, indicating that perceptual novelty drives heightened exploration in early development in a bottom-up manner.

**Authors:**

Mengcun Gao: The Ohio State University; Vladimir Sloutsky: The Ohio State University

Novelty Drives Exploration in Early Development in a Bottom-up Manner

Prior research has shown that children are highly responsive to adults' attention, benefit from its presence and suffer in its absence. Undivided attention is socially favorable and crucial for learning. However, not much is known about the extent to which children make decisions and plans to engage adult attention. In Experiment 1, we looked at whether children (mean: 5;11 range: 4;0-7;11) could distinguish attentive and distracted adults in a minimal contrast where attention was all that varied and they were otherwise matched on affect, contingent responding and other cues. Six and seven-year-olds but not younger children preferred the attentive adults. In Experiment 2, we looked at whether children (mean: 5;11 range: 4;0-7;11) tracked the co-variation between adults’ attentiveness and the content of the interaction and found again that older, but not younger, children used the covariation information to plan interventions to engage the adult’s attention. These results suggest that young children may respond to adult’s attention but not successfully track it across either agents or contexts; by contrast, six and seven-year-olds value attention and make decisions and plan interventions to engage it.

**Authors:**

Shengyi Wu: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Laura Schulz: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Children track variability in adult attention and plan interventions accordingly

Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is known to be associated with racing thoughts. Christoff et al. (2016) posit that the main determinant of the dynamics of spontaneous thoughts is the presence of constraints on cognition, be it automatic or deliberate. In the present project, we operationalized the unfolding of spontaneous thoughts with a word generation paradigm (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2021; Benedek et al., 2012; Jung, 1910): participants had to generate series of 10-30 words aloud, following a metronome. We set out to contrast two levels of constraint on associations (strong and weak) to test their impact on the dynamics of thoughts, and to relate it to sub-clinical ADHD-like symptomatology. Using reaction times and semantic metrics, we show that the participants who scored higher on an ADHD diagnostic questionnaire produced words that were less related, but only in the "weak constraint" condition - akin to free thoughts.

**Authors:**

Adrien Kérébel: Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS); Jerome Sackur: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Dynamics of spontaneous thoughts and its link to the attentional profile

Bilingual infants and toddlers show increased attention capture by faces compared to monolinguals (Mercure et al., 2018; Mousley et al., 2023). A reason for this heightened sensitivity may be that facial information help navigate complex communicative environments: Quick speaker recognition helps predict which language is impending. Efficient processing of emotional facial expression provides a head-start in intention-reading (Wu et al., 2021). 
We explore if bilinguals’ increased social orienting extends into the preschool years and if it makes them more efficient face processors. Study 1 tested 3-4-year-old monolinguals and bilinguals on a visual search task featuring social (faces) and non-social (fruit) targets. In study 2, an independent sample of preschoolers took part in a face-matching paradigm. Participants were asked to tap on the two faces that were “most alike” among four options. Faces either matched on “more communicatively relevant” (identity, emotional facial expression) or “less communicatively relevant” dimensions (sex, ethnicity).

**Authors:**

Ricarda Brieke: University College London (UCL); Chunru Wang: UCL; Lasana Harris: UCL

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