Visuospatial cognitive skills are increasingly recognized as critical in many areas of both formal and informal learning, but far less research has looked at their role in the workforce. We know, for example, that strong visuospatial skills in high school are predictive of STEM occupations, but we know less about how these skills are actually deployed in the workplace, and also the extent to which these skills might also be important in various non-STEM occupational pathways. Our review provides current context for these questions, including identifying occupations for which these research questions are actively being explored, as well as areas that urgently call for more research. We argue that systematic and rigorous cognitive research should be used to inform evidence-based best practices for addressing the unique workforce-related challenges of the 21st century.

Visuospatial Skills and the Workforce: A Brief Review

People's visual experiences are easy to examine along natural language boundaries, e.g., by categories or attributes. However, it is more difficult to elicit detailed visuospatial information about what a person attends to, e.g., the specific shape of a tree. Paying attention to the shapes of things not only feeds into tasks like visual category learning, but also enables us to differentiate similarly named objects and to take on creative visual pursuits, like poetically describing the shape of a thing, or finding shapes in the clouds or stars. We use a new data collection method that elicits people's prioritized attention to shapes during visual photo inspection by asking them to trace important parts of the image under varying time constraints. Using data collected via crowdsourcing over a set of 187 photographs, we examine changes in patterns of visual attention across individuals, across image types, and across time constraints.

Do Time Constraints Re-Prioritize Attention to Shapes During Visual Photo Inspection?

The block design test (BDT), in which a person has to recreate a visual design using colored blocks, is notable among cognitive assessments because it makes so much of a person's problem-solving strategy ``visible'' through their ongoing manual actions. While, for decades, numerous pockets of research on the BDT have identified certain behavioral variables as being important for certain cognitive or neurological hypotheses, there is no unifying framework for bringing together this spread of variables and hypotheses. In this paper, we identify 25 independent and dependent variables that have been examined as part of published BDT studies across many areas of cognitive science and present a sample of the research on each one. We also suggest variables of interest for future BDT research, especially as made possible with the advent of advanced recording technologies like wearable eye trackers.

Measuring More to Learn More From the Block Design Test: A Literature Review

**Date: **Wednesday, July 28, 2021 
**Time: **17:20 CEST - 19:00 CEST 
**Session Description: ** Review the posters you are interested in, watch the videos, and even leave messages for the authors in the Q&A section before joining the poster presenters and exhibitors in Gather.town for live discussion. 
**For a full list of posters in this session, click the See All link on the right side of the page.**

Poster Session 2 -  D: Education, Development and Perspectives in Cognitive Science

poster

### Looking for Cogsci 2023? Please [click here](https://underline.io/events/405/reception) to switch to 2023 edition.


**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year! 

**Your Program Chairs,**
![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/99984908caba5e6453e5fc5ba34f3507.jpg)

**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/464h1m3iU68" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).

CogSci 2021

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.


**For a full list of posters in this session, click the See All link on the right side of the page.**

Poster Session 3 -  C : Cognitive Science

**Session Chair: **Michael Richardson 
**Technical Session Chair: **Alexander Schneider 
**Session Description: ** The session is comprised of 15 minute talks followed by up to 5 minutes of live Q&A time for each presenter.

Maithilee Kunda

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SHORT BIO

Presentations

Visuospatial Skills and the Workforce: A Brief Review

Do Time Constraints Re-Prioritize Attention to Shapes During Visual Photo Inspection?

Measuring More to Learn More From the Block Design Test: A Literature Review

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