Netherlands

The European Upper Palaeolithic is rich in figurative cave art. In particular, prey animals are depicted, often in simple schematic outlines. The role and function of these depic-tions is subject of controversy with many competing ac-counts represented in the literature. Here we apply eye-tracking to investigate participants’ distribution of visual attention as a function of three hypothesized pragmatic functions of the cave art: aesthetic appreciation, narratives about animal behavior, and social learning of animal spe-cies. Results indicate vast variability in visual exploration patterns across the viewing conditions, with more uni-formly distributed attention in the aesthetics condition, more focus on legs and torso in the behavior condition, and more attention to the head regions in the species recognition condition. Findings are discussed in regard to the under- and over-specification of information in the an-imal paintings as a cue to their possible past function.

**Authors:**

Frederieke Nicola Wullf: Aarhus University; Sara Kjær Kristensen: Aarhus University; Isobel Wisher: Aarhus University; Kristian Tylen: Aarhus University

CogSci 2024

Eyes On the Past: visual exploration of Upper Palaeolithic cave art

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.

poster

Some humans, like other animals, may sense magnetic fields: Gurindji people from Australia can locate a hidden magnet solely based on magnetoreception, but an American control group cannot (Meakins, 2022). Why can only some humans use magnetoreception? One possibility is that human magnetoreception is experience-dependent: the fundamental capability may be universal, but the Gurindji learn to use it reliably because, unlike Americans, their language and culture promotes paying constant attention to cardinal directions and thinking about space using a geocentric cognitive map, which sensing the Earth’s magnetic field would help with. If so, we might expect other cultures using geocentric thinking, such as the Hai//om people from Namibia, to have also learned to use magnetoreception. We tested this and found that, unlike Gurindji, Hai//om people could not locate a hidden magnet at above chance levels, suggesting that learning to think geocentrically may not be sufficient to acquire magnetoreception.

**Authors:**

Yağmur Deniz Kısa: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Roman Stengelin: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Luke Maurits: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Daniel Benjamin Moritz Haun: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Is magnetoreception experience-dependent in humans?

In this paper, we catalog the rates at which people report spiritual presence events: phenomenal experiences understood by the perceiver to imply the presence of a spiritual being. We draw on four large datasets (total N=3150) collected in the US, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, including participants from a range of religious backgrounds. This yields what is, to our knowledge, an unprecedented “epidemiology” of spiritual presence events across diverse cultural settings. While some events vary dramatically in their rates of endorsement across cultural settings, other events are relatively common across all five settings, and still others are relatively rare across settings. In general, the most common events center on ordinary experiences of one’s own inner life, while events that hinge on near-tangible perceptions of presence and hallucination-like events involving outer sensory experiences are relatively rare. In sum, local culture shapes but does not fully determine the architecture of spiritual experience.

**Authors:**

Eleanor Brower Schille-Hudson: Stanford University; Kara Weisman: University of California, Riverside; Tanya Luhrmann: Stanford

Rates of Spiritual Presence Events

People from every culture observe the natural world in detail and organize it into categories, and Western biology builds on this universal impulse towards classification. Here we provide a quantitative analysis of factors that shape folk and scientific classification of birds from areas associated with three indigenous languages (Anindilyakwa, Tlingit, and Zapotec). We find that traditional Linnaean taxonomies align better with folk categories than do modern phylogenetic classifications, which suggests that human perception is responsible in part for the correspondence between Linnaean and folk taxonomies. Perceptual similarity is difficult to measure at scale, but we use the recently-released AVONET database to develop a proxy for the perceptual similarity between pairs of birds and find that traditional Linnaean taxonomies and perceptual similarity both independently predict folk categories. Our results therefore provide quantitative evidence for the view that perceptual similarity influences both scientific and folk classification.

**Authors:**

Zoë Amanda Wilson: University of Melbourne; Charles Kemp: University of Melbourne

Perceptual Similarity and the Relationship Between Folk and Scientific Bird Classification

Understanding visual narratives requires readers to track dimensions of time, spatial location, and characters across a sequence. Previous work found cross-cultural differences for situational changes across adjacent panels, but few works have examined situational dimensions across extended sequences. We therefore investigated situational “runs” – uninterrupted sequences of the situational dimensions (time, space, characters) – in a corpus of 300+ annotated comics from the United States, Europe, and Asia. We compared runs’ proportion and average lengths and found that across books, semantic information changed frequently and run length correlated with proportion. Yet, cross-cultural patterns arose, with American and European comics using more continuous runs than Asian comics. American and European comics used more and longer temporal and character continuity, while Asian comics used more spatial continuity. These findings raise questions about comprehenders’ processing strategies for visual narratives across cultures and how general frameworks of visual narrative comprehension account for variations in situational (dis)continuity.

**Authors:**

Bien Klomberg: Tilburg University; Irmak Hacımusaoğlu: Tilburg University; Neil Cohn: Tilburg University

Who, Where, and When: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Situational Changes in Comics

Literary and aesthetic studies have suggested that readers can stay in indeterminate states where they hold multiple interpretations, and that this indeterminate interpretation state causes an aesthetic feeling, involvement, and understanding of art. To explore the indeterminate interpretation state, we employed a quantum cognition framework and conducted a reading experiment using a short story. The results suggest that readers' interpretations can be regarded as a superposition state corresponding to the indeterminate and polysemous interpretation of the story. We also estimated a time series of quantum indeterminacy and discussed the text features related to quantum indeterminacy.

**Authors:**

Miho Fuyama: Ritsumeikan University

Estimating a Time Series of Interpretation Indeterminacy in Reading a Short Story Using a Quantum Cognition Model

Neural Episodic Control is a powerful reinforcement learning framework that employs a differentiable dictionary to store non-parametric memories. It was inspired by episodic memory on the functional level, but lacks a direct theoretical connection to the associative memory models generally used to implement such a memory. We first show that the dictionary is an instance of the recently proposed Universal Hopfield Network framework. We then introduce a continuous approximation of the dictionary readout operation in order to derive two energy functions that are Lyapunov functions of the dynamics. Finally, we empirically show that the dictionary outperforms the Max separation function, which had previously been argued to be optimal, and that performance can further be improved by replacing the Euclidean distance kernel by a Manhattan distance kernel. These results are enabled by the generalization capabilities of the dictionary, so a novel criterion is introduced to disentangle memorization from generalization when evaluating associative memory models.

**Authors:**

Hugo Chateau-Laurent: Inria centre at the university of Bordeaux; Frederic Alexandre: Inria centre at the university of Bordeaux

Relating Hopfield Networks to Episodic Control

The increasing prevalence of dementia and cognitive impairments in the aging global population poses significant challenges to healthcare and society. Detecting cognitive impairment is crucial for managing diseases like Alzheimer's, yet current research faces limitations such as reliance on cross-sectional studies and a lack of understanding of causal relationships. In response, our study introduces a dynamic causal graph-based learning approach for predicting cognitive impairment risk in middle-aged and older adults. Employing a longitudinal perspective, we uncover causal structures through causal discovery methods, offering profound insights into cognitive changes over time. Our model, utilizing dynamic input variables, outperforms traditional algorithms while enhancing interpretability. This innovative approach not only improves prediction accuracy but also contributes to a deeper comprehension of the causal mechanisms underlying cognitive impairment. The longitudinal insight offers a comprehensive understanding of evolving factors associated with cognitive changes, making our model valuable for both research and practical applications.

**Authors:**

Linna Wang: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University; Xinyu Guo: Department of Health Policy and Management, West China School of Public Health and West China Fourth Hospital, Sichuan University; Yunyi Zhou: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University; Zhenchao Li: Sichuan University; Lihua Jiang: Department of Health Policy and Management, West China School of Public Health and West China Fourth Hospital, Sichuan University; Li Zhao: Department of Health Policy and Management, West China School of Public Health and West China Fourth Hospital, Sichuan University; Ziliang Feng: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University; Li Lu: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University

Dynamic Causal Graph-Based Learning Approach for Predicting Cognitive Impairment in Middle-Aged and Older Adults

This paper presents an approach to model the internal cognitive state of decision-makers when interacting with AI to understand exchanges between agents and improve future interactions. We focus on realizing how the process of AI suggestions is perceived by a human agent using an approach based on the technology acceptance model. The variation in the user's state has been investigated when perceiving the interaction with AI by considering it as a hidden (latent) state. Using human evaluation data collected from two cases of clinical decision-making and software development domains respectively we have analysed the data to understand the perceptional state during interaction. The experiment was conducted using the Bayesian belief network to represent the human perceptional model and provide a prediction of the usefulness of AI suggestions in the considered case. Upon introduction of cognitive states in the model we observed an increase in predictive performance by 76–77%. Our investigation can be concluded as an attempt to identify implicit static and dynamic cognitive characteristics of a user to provide personalized assistance in human-AI interaction and collaboration in the complex domain of decision-making.

**Authors:**

Sergey Kovalchuk: Huawei; Ashish Tara Shivakumar Ireddy: ITMO University

Prediction of Users Perceptional State for Human-Centric Decision Support Systems in Complex Domains through Implicit Cognitive State Modeling

How does language input lead to meaning? Is the answer in large language models - or certain "translations" they afford? Or does the answer remain in formal semantics theories? Here, we take a different approach. We cast language understanding as Bayesian inference in a generative model of how world states arise and project to utterances. We develop this model in a case study of action understanding from language input: inferring the goal of an agent in 2D gridworlds from utterances. The generative model provides a prior over agents' goals, a planner that maps these goals to actions, and a `language-renderer' that creates utterances from these actions. The generative model also incorporates GPT-2 as a noisy language production model. We invert this process with sequential Monte Carlo. In a behavioral experiment, the resulting model, called GSTP, explains evolving goal inferences of humans as utterances unfold.

**Authors:**

Lorenss Martinsons: Yale University; John Muchovej: Yale University; Ilker Yildirim: Yale University

Generative Semantic Transformation Process: A Case Study in Goal Prediction via Online Bayesian Language Inference

We integrate emotional mechanisms into the RL framework, conceptualizing emotions as a hierarchical controller influencing a baseline RL agent. This approach is designed to be broad, encompassing various contemporary perspectives on embedding emotions in RL agents. Rather than predefining the specific functional form of emotional control, we treat emotional mechanisms as the result of an optimization problem. This optimization aligns with evolutionary theories of emotion, aiming to endow RL agents with emotional mechanisms that optimize their survival across diverse environments. While this perspective has previously been adapted to generate intrinsic reward signals, we extend it more broadly to other aspects of emotional control - learning, planning and action selection. In this specific work we present a first step in this direction: i.e. we formulate a generalized version of the optimal reward problem where intrinsic rewards are temporally extended. We study the framework in the context of 2 armed bandit tasks.

**Authors:**

Prakhar Godara: TU Darmstadt

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