United States

As conversational AI systems like ChatGPT become increasingly adept at socially engaging interactions, users are more likely to form emotional attachments to these technologies. This study explores the relationship between autistic traits and emotional attachment to ChatGPT, emphasizing the mediating roles of Theory of Mind and social anxiety. A sample of 286 participants completed the study. The structural equation modeling analysis revealed that Theory of Mind partially mediated the relationship between autistic traits and emotional attachment to the chatbot, while social anxiety did not show a significant mediating effect. These findings underscore the critical role of individual differences in shaping attachment to AI, suggesting opportunities for personalized designs and raising questions about the psychological implications of such bonds.

CogSci 2025

Theory of Mind and Social Anxiety in Emotional Attachment to AI Chatbots in Individuals with Autistic Traits

human-computer interaction

psychology

artificial intelligence

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><br>
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

poster

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

<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/amvr/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>

#### About

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.

#### Our History 

* **Society Creation**<br>
The Society was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts in 1979. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. 
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* **Conference Creation**<br>
The first conference on cognitive science was held at La Jolla, California in August, 1979, and has occurred annually since then. The proceedings of each conference are published, and those from most years are available through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The annual proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference represent a major source of information on new work and new ideas in the scientific study of thinking. In 1990, the Society, with help from an anonymous donor, established the David Marr Prize for the best student paper at each annual meeting.
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* **Journal Creation**<br>
The Journal, Cognitive Science, began publication in 1976, and is now published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Executive Editor is currently Richard P. Cooper of Birkbeck, University of London, and there are 18 Associate Editors and a 30-member editorial board. It serves as the premier outlet for research reports that intersect two or more disciplines. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society. The Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society voted in late 2006 to found a new journal, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). The Editor in Chief is Wayne Gray, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The journal seeks to fill a niche not occupied by Cognitive Science Journal or other cognitive science journals. Membership in the Society includes a subscription to Cognitive Science and TopiCS. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society.
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#### Code of Conduct

By attending the CogSci 2025 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s **[Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ChPuihLy6jE_BWqfO7J2KKgX35JW2zsM/view?usp=sharing)**.
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The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

When talking about the world in front of us, humans are remarkably efficient communicators. Our referential expressions help listeners efficiently find what we’re talking about by strategically adding color or material words. But most conversations involve things not physically in front of us. In these cases, do we also use language to efficiently help a listener retrieve an item from memory? Across two experiments, we asked participants to describe images to help a listener recall them. In Experiment 1 (n = 600), participants spontaneously incorporated expectations about memorability by providing more description for images they expected to be less memorable. People’s descriptions aligned more with subjective memorability estimates rather than objective, empirically-derived metrics. In Experiment 2 (n = 300), we replicated this pattern even when participants had no access to their listener’s prior experience. Together, this work provides evidence that speakers spontaneously guide listeners’ mental processes to effectively facilitate memory recall.

Speakers strategically adjust their descriptions based on perceived memorability

We demonstrate that inducing the construction of a coherent, biodiversity-conserving moral narrative about one’s place in the world can have a lasting impact on pro-biodiversity behaviors. Across two studies (n=447 and n= 509), one-time under-40-minute interventions leveraging two basic cognitive constraints — coherence and causal invariance — led to increased intentions to take biodiversity-conserving actions (Phase 1) and subsequent self-reports of engagement in these actions assessed a year later (Study 2 Phase 2, n=344). This sustained impact contrasts sharply with the typically short-lived (< 2 weeks) effects of pro-environmental messaging. Participants completed exercises implementing the constraints to foster an expanded sense of self. Results show that the expanded self (e.g., agreement with “I imagine myself to be part of a larger cyclical process of living”) mediated reports of engagement in biodiversity-supporting actions (e.g., donating to biodiversity organizations). These effects held across political ideologies, suggesting the approach’s broader applicability to other persuasion topics.

Promoting Actions to Conserve Biodiversity: A Cognitive Constraints Approach

Cognitive offloading refers to the usage of physical actions to reduce the cognitive load of a task. This study investigates cognitive offloading in a multiple object tracking (MOT) task, in which participants could decide whether they wanted a computer partner to track targets on their behalf. Depending on the experimental condition, participants either received team performance feedback or not. In all conditions, participants knew that the computer partner would track targets flawlessly. We hypothesized that feedback would change participants’ metacognitive assessments such that they would maximize performance (i.e., changing their strategy by offloading more or all targets to the computer partner). We find that participants do offload targets to the computer partner in all conditions. Yet, performance feedback did not increase the extent of cognitive offloading. While these findings dovetail with previous findings, future studies are needed to definitively rule out whether performance feedback has an effect on cognitive offloading.

The Role of Feedback in Cognitive Offloading during Human-Computer Collaboration

Do Young Children Learn Words from the Company they Keep?

We adapted Irving’s (2014) Image Control and Recognition Task (ICRT) to explore a phenomenon we term outsight. The ICRT is a visual synthesis task: Participants construct a mental image of an object following stepwise instructions. They are then asked to name and subsequently draw the imagined object. We focus on trials when participants after having failed to name their mental image, could do so after having drawn it. In this exploratory study, such outsight recognition occurred on 29% of the ICRT trials. In addition, outsight recognition was accompanied by some of the phenomenological markers associated with aha! experiences. We offer some reflections on the importance of reified imagery for creativity.

Externalizing Imagery: Exploring the Phenomenology of Outsight

Traditional education is instructor-centered. Providing exploratory learning activities before instruction typically engages students and improves learning. However, the design of exploratory learning activities can impact learning processes. This study investigated whether using tables or graphs in a statistics activity impacted exploratory learning processes and outcomes. Undergraduate students (N=252) in classroom and lab settings were taught about standard deviation. In instruct-first conditions, students received instruction, then an activity including either graphs or tables. In explore-first conditions, students explored either activity before instruction. After exploring, participants in the explore-first condition reported greater knowledge gaps and curiosity than the instruct-first condition. Graphical materials reduced cognitive load compared to tabular. However, instructional order and activity design did not impact learning outcomes (procedural knowledge, conceptual knowledge, representational transfer). Conceptual understanding was highest if students attempted multiple solutions while exploring graphical materials. Depth of exploration may affect conceptual benefits, especially when using graphical materials.

Exploring a Problem Before Instruction Using Graphs versus Tables

Understanding how experts and novices allocate visual attention during mathematical problem-solving can reveal novel insights into cognitive processing. This study investigates eye-movement patterns in linear algebra tasks using entropy and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA). Eye-tracking data were collected from participants of varying expertise levels, analyzing fixation duration, scan paths, and pupillometry between key Areas of Interest (AOIs). Results indicate that experts exhibit lower entropy, suggesting a more systematic, targeted approach, whereas novices display higher entropy, reflecting exploratory and less efficient search strategies. A Welch Two-Sample t-test confirmed significant differences in entropy scores, with experts showing greater attentional focus in key areas. These findings highlight the role of visual attention in mathematical cognition. Our research underscores the potential of entropy-based metrics for assessing problem-solving strategies, with implications for content sequencing and designing instructional tools that scaffold visual attention in STEM education.

Through the Eyes of Expertise: Decoding Mathematical Cognition with Eye-Tracking and Entropy

Studies of category learning have revealed individual differences in decision-making, such that the same stimulus may be categorized differently across individuals. Modeling accounts have explained these differences in terms of how attention weights are distributed across stimulus dimensions that distinguish between category responses. These weights are typically assumed to reflect an individual’s beliefs about which dimensions are most relevant to their goals. The current work investigates the possibility that instead of being purely strategic, attention weights are constrained by what was encoded into memory during learning. Participants (N=120, age 18-25) completed a category learning task while gaze was recorded as an exogenous measure of attention. Model-based analyses using gaze to predict behavior revealed that accounting for partially-encoded representations was necessary for predicting individual differences in feature memory and categorization.

Gaze Insights into Partially-Encoded Representations of Objects and Categories

Is virtual reality (VR) necessary to conduct complex immersive eye-tracking studies or can similar data be recorded and analyzed in the real world? 

We adapted a spatial navigation paradigm from VR to the real city Limassol. Specifically, we combined a free exploration of 130 min with two pointing tasks while recording eye-tracking, head-tracking and GPS data. We labeled the eye-tracking data with a new classification pipeline and found a similar gaze distribution over object categories in both the real world and VR. Furthermore, we hand-labeled fixations on buildings to apply a graph-theoretical analysis. When comparing our results with VR we found some differences (e.g. graph density, diameter), but also many similarities in viewing behavior (e.g. hierarchy index, gaze-graph-defined landmarks).  

Overall, our work showcases the feasibility of complex eye-tracking experiments in the real world and highlights the similarity of viewing behavior in both the real world and virtual reality.

Eye tracking in the real world: a graph-theoretical analysis and comparison to virtual realty

Walking, traditionally considered an automated process, can become cognitively demanding during dual-task (DT). Up to now, language-motor interactions, such as walking and listening to speech remain underexplored in DT studies, despite the frequent co-occurrence of these activities in daily life. In addition, research on embodied semantics points at the potential of certain words’ meaning interacting with actual body movements. Yet no study so far has addressed this issue in relation to gait. This ongoing experiment examines a) the potential motor-cognitive interference of concurrent walking and speech processing and b) the potential semantic effects when action verbs are actively processed during walking. We tested 20 adults using motion capture with concurrent optical imaging (fNIRS) to assess gait variation along with frontal and motor cortex activation. Preliminary findings suggest that gait patterns remain consistent with and without speech processing during walking. However, processing action-related verbs while walking is associated with reduced motor cortex activation.

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