United States

CogSci 2025

A computational foundation for caregiving

**BRACIS** originated from the combination of the two most important scientific events in Brazil in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI): the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence – **SBIA** (22 editions), and the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks – **SBRN** (13 editions). <br>**ENIAC** is a national forum for researchers, practitioners, educators and students to present and discuss innovations, trends, experiences, developments and work in progress in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence. <br>**STIL** is the bi-annual Language Technology event.
All events are supported by the Brazilian Computer Society – Special Interest Groups: **CE-IA**, **CE-IC** and **CE-PLN**.<br><br><br>

To access the 10th Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (**BRACIS**), you need to register for the conference.  Please visit the Conference official site to register

[Register now](http://c4ai.inova.usp.br/bracis2021/)

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BRACIS 2021

BRACIS originated from the combination of the two most important scientific events in Brazil in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI): the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence – SBIA (22 editions), and the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks – SBRN (13 editions). 
ENIAC is a national forum for researchers, practitioners, educators and students to present and discuss innovations, trends, experiences, developments and work in progress in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence. 
STIL is the bi-annual Language Technology event.
All events are supported by the Brazilian Computer Society – Special Interest Groups: CE-IA, CE-IC and CE-PLN

symposium

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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#### 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.
<br><br>

#### 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)**.
<br><br>


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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.

Symbolic writing systems are graphical semiotic codes that are ubiquitous in modern society but are otherwise absent in the animal kingdom. Anthropological evidence suggests that the earliest forms of some writing systems originally consisted of iconic pictographs, which signify their referent via visual resemblance. While previous studies have examined the emergence and, separately, the evolution of pictographic systems through a computational lens, most employ non-naturalistic methodologies that make it difficult to draw clear analogies to human and animal cognition. We develop a multi-agent reinforcement learning testbed for emergent communication called a Signification Game, and formulate a model of inferential communication that enables agents to leverage visual theory of mind to communicate actions using pictographs. Our model, which is situated within a broader formalism for animal communication, sheds light on the cognitive and cultural processes underlying the emergence of proto-writing.

Visual Theory of Mind Enables the Invention of Proto-Writing

This paper presents a proof of principle for Trace Minimalism (Werning, 2020), a novel philosophical framework for episodic memory. Trace Minimalism claims that remembering does not involve the storage of representational content but rather the reconstruction of past scenarios through the interaction of minimal traces with semantic information. Minimal traces establish a causal link to prior experiences but lack categorical and compositional content. We provide a neuro-computational model using a vector-quantized autoencoder and a transformer-based semantic completion mechanism. Our findings support the hypothesis that remembering is possible without representational memory traces and that minimal traces, in interaction with semantic information, reliably construct past scenarios. The results offer a compelling alternative to classical representational theories of memory while maintaining causal continuity with past experiences.

From Minimal Traces to Scenarios of the Past: A Neuro-Computational Model on Regaining Categoricity and Compositionality in Remembering

Linguistic accommodation is the process by which people make their language more like that of their interlocutor, and has been argued to contribute to language change. However, it is unclear to what extent people of different neurotypes accommodate, or how neurotype mixing -- which has been shown to reduce communicative success -- impacts linguistic accommodation. In this paper, we build on previous research which uses artificial language learning to investigate accommodation as a mechanism for linguistic regularisation (i.e., the reduction of variation in a grammatical system). We test the impact of neurotype mixing on accommodation, with the aim of better understanding whether such mixing impacts processes of language change. Our results suggest that both allistic and autistic participants accommodate less and retain less of the variant when in mixed-neurotype pairs, but that this effect is more pronounced in autistic people. We discuss the importance of these results with respect to the Double Empathy theory of mixed-neurotype communication and language evolution.

Neuro-identity mixing impacts linguistic accommodation and regularisation: evidence from autistic and allistic interactions

Denic and Szymanik (2024, henceforth D&S) argued that recursive numeral systems optimize the tradeoff between lexicon size and average morphosyntactic complexity. In support of this claim, they showed that a broad range of attested numeral systems trade off these two quantities nearly as well as the best of a large set of artificial numeral systems. However, D&S’ artificial systems were in some respects not entirely comparable to natural ones. Here, we address this issue by creating a grammar framework that can represent both natural and artificial numeral systems, and we derive both natural and artificial numeral systems from this single framework, which ensures the comparability of the two sorts of systems. We test D&S’ original claim under these new conditions, and find support for it. We also explore the proposal that numeral systems might optimize the sum of lexicon size and average morphosyntactic complexity under a fixed weighting of the two terms, and the role of the prior distribution over numbers.

Re-examining the tradeoff between lexicon size and average morphosyntactic complexity in recursive numeral systems

Aging greatly affects memory, but not all aspects are impaired equally. Past research has demonstrated that older adults show greater deficits in remembering where an object was encountered compared to what was experienced. A third dimension, that has received less attention in this context is memory for when events occurred. In this study, we employed a Sequential Memory Task (SMT) in which participants memorized spatio-temporal visual object sequences over repeated exposures. In two experiments with 39 younger (YAs, 18-35 years) and 53 older adults (OAs, 65-75 years), we examined age-related differences in sequence memory (when) and the interplay between item (what), and location (where) knowledge. Our results revealed that memory was stronger for item sequences than for location sequences or item-location combinations in both younger and older adults. In addition, older adults exhibited greater age-related deficits in location-related memory. We also found that item and location memory were bi-directionally related and that even pure item sequence reports involved location memory and vice versa. Both age groups relied more on item-location binding associations than on transition learning, but computational modeling indicated a higher reliance on independent location transition learning in OAs than YAs. This suggests that the strong age-related impairment in spatial location memory was in part driven by age-differences in memory binding. These findings provide insights into age-related changes in spatio-temporal sequence memory, and highlight distinct learning strategies in younger and older adults.

Age-related differences in forming conjunctive memories of what, when and where

In this pre-registered study, we examined how non-verbal uncertainty cues, namely intonation and facial expressions, influence perceived speaker certainty and the interpretation of verbal probability phrases (e.g., "almost never," "probably," "certain"). Prior research on such phrases has focused on written cues, whereas communication often includes auditory and visual signals. Using a 2x2 within-subjects experimental design (N=100), we found that rising intonation and marked facial expressions independently reduced perceived speaker certainty. In most, but not all conditions, these cues led to greater variability in how participants assigned numerical values to verbal probability expressions (e.g., interpreting "likely" as anywhere from 10% to 85% likely). Notably, the combination of rising intonation and marked facial expressions produced the lowest perceived certainty, while there was no such additive effect on interpretation variability. These results highlight the importance of non-verbal cues in uncertainty communication, with implications for fields such as health, environmental, and technological risk communication.

Raising Eyebrows and Raising Pitch: How Non-Verbal Uncertainty Cues Influence Assessments of Probability Phrases

Human social interactions can often be modeled as mixed-motive games, where cooperation and competition coexist. Although many studies have examined how people coordinate in purely cooperative settings, less is known about how individuals navigate severe, protracted conflicts to reach mutually beneficial settlements. In this study, we introduced a long-horizon territorial conflict game in which participants competed on a two-dimensional board by dispatching troops to expand their territory. Despite repeated interactions, conflict intensity did not subside over time—contrary to findings in simpler, one-shot matrix games. However, when a payoff-irrelevant color boundary was introduced, participants used this salient perceptual cue as a focal point for dividing the territory. The presence of this “territorial Gestalt” shifted strategies toward defensive postures, reduced the frequency of direct battles, and enabled opponents to settle conflicts precisely along the perceptual boundary. These findings extend focal point theory by demonstrating that humans naturally import external, payoff-irrelevant concepts into conflict situations to achieve coordinated outcomes. Our results highlight the importance of perception-based territorial Gestalt in fostering cooperative resolutions to otherwise intense and enduring disputes.

Territorial Gestalt in the Strategy of Conflicts

The origin of abstract concepts remains a central question in cognitive science. Empiricists argue that abstract concepts can be learned through a small set of domain-general cognitive mechanisms, whereas nativists argue that most abstract concepts are not learned at all. To explore these opposing views, we examine the abstract concept of number. Drawing on a recent “emergentist” proposal derived from machine learning models, we tested whether stimuli that align with experiences critical for an empiricist view of number perception result in more accurate and less variable numeric estimations. Five- to nine-year-olds were tested on stimuli that conformed to the natural statistics of objects (i.e., number was correlated with features such as cumulative area and spatial position, and the distribution of stimuli was power-law based) or those that did not comply with these statistics. We find little-to-no evidence for predictions of the emergentist theory when presenting children with natural stimuli.

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