Data visualizations are powerful tools for communicating quantitative information. While prior work has focused on how experts design informative graphs, little is known about the intuitions non-experts have about what makes a graph effective for communicating a specific message. In the current study, we asked participants (N=398) which of 8 graphs would be most useful for answering a particular question, where all graphs were generated from the same dataset but varied in how data were arranged. We tested the degree to which participants based their decisions on sensitivity to how easily other participants (N=542) would actually be able to answer that question with that graph. Our results suggest that while people were biased towards graphs that were minimally informative (i.e., contained the relevant variables), their decisions did not necessarily reflect sensitivity to more graded, but systematic variation in actual graph comprehension performance.

How do communicative goals guide which data visualizations people think are effective?

People can understand images that vary in visual abstraction---from detailed illustrations to schematic icons. 
To what degree are current vision algorithms sensitive to such variation when encoding their meaning? 
We first obtained >80K human-generated sketches produced under different time limits (4s, 8s, 16s, 32s; N=5,563 participants) and AI-generated sketches (Vinker et al., 2022) produced under different ink limits (8, 16, 32 strokes) of 2,048 real-world objects spanning 128 categories from the THINGS dataset (Hebart et al.,2019).
We then evaluated how 13 state-of-the-art vision algorithms varying in architecture and training represented the meaning of these sketches, both at the category and exemplar levels, and without additional training.
We found that these models were generally sensitive to variation in visual abstraction, although some models were substantially more sensitive than others.
Together, these findings suggest promising avenues for building better models of human visual abstraction.

Evaluating machine comprehension of sketch meaning at different levels of abstraction

Dimensions of Diversity in Spatial Cognition: Culture, Context, Age, and Ability

Children produce increasingly more recognizable drawings of object concepts throughout childhood. What drives this improvement? Here we explore the role of children's ability to include relevant parts of those objects in their drawings. We crowdsourced part tags for every pen stroke in 2,160 drawings of 16 common object categories that had been produced by children between 4 and 8 years old. These part decompositions revealed both substantial variation in the number and kind of parts that children emphasized, as well as a non-monotonic relationship between the number of parts that children drew and how recognizable their drawing was. We plan to publicly release these data to catalyze further investigation of how children's drawings change across development.

Developmental changes in the semantic part structure of drawn objects

Drawing is a powerful cognitive technology for creating external representations of thought. While drawings have long provided inspiration to researchers in many areas of cognitive science, including psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience, these communities have not generally had opportunities to interact and share insights. The goal of this workshop is to bring together perspectives from multiple disciplines to explore the question of how humans use drawings to communicate knowledge, catalyzing new opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration. We are introducing a novel “flipped” format wherein we will hold three virtual seminars in the weeks leading up to CogSci 2022, each highlighting insights from Machine Learning, Neuroscience, and Developmental Science, respectively. Holding these thematic seminars in advance will enable us to attract a broader audience for our event and focus on promoting informal interaction among workshop attendees at the on-site event.

From Images to a Lexicon: Getting Human-like Meaning out of Drawings

From Images to Symbols: Drawing as a Window into the Mind (W3.6)

What visualization strategies do people use to communicate abstract knowledge to others? We developed a drawing paradigm to elicit visual explanations about novel machines and obtained detailed annotations of the semantic information conveyed in each drawing. We found that these visual explanations contained: (1) greater emphasis on causally relevant parts of the machine, (2) less emphasis on structural features that were visually salient but causally irrelevant, and (3) more symbols, relative to baseline drawings intended only to communicate the machines' appearance. However, this overall pattern of emphasis did not necessarily improve naive viewers' ability to infer how to operate the machines, nor their ability to identify them, suggesting a potential mismatch between what people believe a visual explanation contains and what may be most useful. Taken together, our findings advance our understanding of how communicative goals constrain visual communication of abstract knowledge across behavioral contexts.

How do the semantic properties of visual explanations guide causal inference?

Poster Session 2

poster

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference. 
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

Join us!

 [**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
 [**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
 

#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
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CogSci 2023

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Poster Session 1

**Speakers**: Tyler Marghetis, University of California, Merced; Benjamin Pitt, University of California, Berkeley, Chair; Holly Huey, University of California, San Diego; Roberto Bottini, Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento
 
Throughout the lifespan and across cultures, all human behavior happens in space. By early childhood, people are capable of navigating complex 3D environments, executing sophisticated motor plans, and coordinating action with others. They also use their representations of space to structure a variety of non-spatial concepts, including time, number, similarity, and emotion. How do people perform these cognitive feats? One source of insight comes from studying the diversity of spatial cognition: Although the physical properties of space are invariant, the way people typically conceptualize space varies radically across groups, between individuals, and over development. By studying this variation in spatial cognition, we can better understand the universal set of cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie it, with implications for the cognitive sciences, education, and design. In that spirit, this symposium brings together researchers who work in disparate subfields (i.e. neuroscience, complexity science, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology) to discuss four different dimensions of diversity in spatial cognition, as it varies across cultures, contexts, ages, and abilities. **Paper1** focuses on cross-cultural diversity at a global scale. Taking a systems-level approach, this work leverages decades of published field work across dozens of cultures to clarify patterns and predictors of spatial cognition, and to identify blind spots and biases in the kinds of cultures that have been sampled. **Paper2** zooms in on a single culture — the Tsimane’ of Bolivia. By studying how spatial concepts (and spatial language) vary at the level of the individual, this work seeks to clarify the principles that govern such variation, at any level. **Paper3** focuses on changes in spatial cognition over development. By comparing the geometrical intuitions of children and adults (within and across cultures), this work helps to clarify the universal and cultural origins of our visuospatial knowledge. Finally, **Paper4** investigates how blindness alters neural representations of space. Using fMRI techniques in congenitally-blind adults, this work clarifies the role of vision in cognitive maps, the foundation of spatial navigation. Together, these talks offer a multi-dimensional view of spatial cognitive diversity, and motivate interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the mind.

Symposium 3: Dimensions of Diversity in Spatial Cognition: Culture, Context, Age, and Ability

symposium

Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
 [**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Cogsci-2022-PAAG-Detailed-July-12final-1.pdf)
 [**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/DeArmond-CogSci2022-program-v113-final.pdf)

This conference requires a registration to attend. Please use the link below to secure your ticket. The website will be available to all registered attendees on July 25th. 

[Register to Attend](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/registration/)

Registration Is Required

CogSci 2022

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





Poster Session 1: Education, language acquisition, and development

**Organizers and Presenters:** Kushin Mukherjee, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Holly Huey, University of California, San Diego; Timothy Rogers, University of WisconsinMadison; Judith Fan, University of California, San Diego
 
 
Drawing is a powerful cognitive technology for creating external representations of thought. While drawings have long provided inspiration to researchers in many areas of cognitive science, including psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience, these communities have not generally had opportunities to interact and share insights. The goal of this workshop is to bring together perspectives from multiple disciplines to explore the question of how humans use drawings to communicate knowledge, catalyzing new opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration. We are introducing a novel “flipped” format wherein we will hold three virtual seminars in the weeks leading up to CogSci 2022, each highlighting insights from Machine Learning, Neuroscience, and Developmental Science, respectively. Holding these thematic seminars in advance will enable us to attract a broader audience for our event and focus on promoting informal interaction among workshop attendees at the on-site event.

Workshop 3: From images to symbols: Drawing as a window into the mind

workshop paper

**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

### 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.

Holly Huey

7

SHORT BIO

Presentations

How do communicative goals guide which data visualizations people think are effective?

Evaluating machine comprehension of sketch meaning at different levels of abstraction

Dimensions of Diversity in Spatial Cognition: Culture, Context, Age, and Ability

Developmental changes in the semantic part structure of drawn objects

From Images to a Lexicon: Getting Human-like Meaning out of Drawings

From Images to Symbols: Drawing as a Window into the Mind (W3.6)

How do the semantic properties of visual explanations guide causal inference?

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