Canada

Sentence comprehension involves simultaneous processes such as maintaining and integrating different types of verbal representations. As such, it has been argued that sentence comprehension relies on working memory (WM). Some findings suggest that semantic (word meaning) WM rather than phonological (speech sound) WM is critical for comprehension. This study took a case-series multiple regression approach to examine the relationship between sentence comprehension and WM for 56 individuals with aphasia. We examined the independent contribution of phonological and semantic WM in predicting comprehension for higher WM target sentences relative to matched lesser WM sentences, while also controlling for single word processing. We found that only semantic WM had a significant contribution to comprehension for three contrasts. However, for the fourth contrast of trials requiring syntactic processing with those requiring only lexical processing, both WM contributions were significant. The possible backup role of phonological WM for comprehension of role reversals is discussed.

CogSci 2022

Semantic Working Memory Predicts Relative Clause Sentence Comprehension: A Case Series Approach

### 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. 
<br><br>
* **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.
<br><br>
* **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>


You need to log in with the email address you registered with. 

Login credentials were sent to you from Underline -  subject line "Welcome to the CogSci 2025 Conference". Please be sure to check your spam/promotional inbox  if you do not see an email confirmation right away.





Please log in to join this event.

To access the site, please register [**here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/registration/).

If you are registered and feel like you are seeing this message by mistake, please make sure you are logged in with the same email that you registered with. 

Please register!

CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

poster

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.
<br>
<br>[**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)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/DeArmond-CogSci2022-program-v113-final.pdf)
<br>
<br>

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

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. 





Neural networks struggle in continual learning settings from catastrophic forgetting: when trials are blocked, new learning can overwrite the learning from previous blocks. Humans learn effectively in these settings, in some cases even showing an advantage of blocking, suggesting the brain contains mechanisms to overcome this problem. Here, we build on previous work and show that neural networks equipped with a mechanism for cognitive control do not exhibit catastrophic forgetting when trials are blocked. We further show an advantage of blocking over interleaving when there is a bias for active maintenance in the control signal, implying a tradeoff between maintenance and the strength of control. Analyses of map-like representations learned by the networks provided additional insights into these mechanisms. Our work highlights the potential of cognitive control to aid continual learning in neural networks, and offers an explanation for the advantage of blocking that has been observed in humans.

A Neural Network Model of Continual Learning with Cognitive Control

Recent work has shown that the brain organizes abstract, non-spatial relationships between entities into map-like representations. However, an animal’s objectives often depend on only a subset of the features of the environment. Under these circumstances, cognitive control – the capacity to flexibly select the features most relevant in the current context – becomes paramount. Here, we explore the relationship between cognitive control and the geometry of map-like representations by combining fMRI with neural network modeling. We find that brain areas including hippocampus and entorhinal cortex spontaneously organize pairwise relationships into 2D map-like representations, and that this 2D structure was controlled by compressing task-irrelevant dimensions in areas of prefrontal and parietal cortex. Our neural network model reproduced these findings and additionally predicted warping in the geometry along a context-invariant axis. This prediction was confirmed with fMRI, which showed that the degree of warping was correlated with individual differences in cognitive control.

The Geometry of Map-Like Representations under Dynamic Cognitive Control

Distributed vector representations are a key bridging point between connectionist and symbolic representations of cognition. It is unclear how uncertainty should be modelled in systems using such representations. One may place vector-valued distributions over vector representations, although that may assign non-zero probabilities to vector symbols that cannot occur. In this paper we discuss how bundles of symbols in Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) can be understood as defining an object that has a relationship to a probability distribution, and how statements in VSAs can be understood as being analogous to probabilistic statements. We sketch novel designs for networks that compute entropy and mutual information. In this paper we restrict ourselves to operators proposed for Holographic Reduced Representations, and representing real-valued data. However, we suggest that the methods presented in this paper should translate to any VSA where the dot product between fractionally bound symbols induces a valid kernel.

Fractional Binding in Vector Symbolic Architectures as Quasi-Probability Statements

Models in cognitive science are often restricted for the sake of interpretability, and as a result may miss patterns in the data that are instead classified as noise. In contrast, deep neural networks can detect almost any pattern given sufficient data, but have only recently been applied to large-scale data sets and tasks for which there already exist process-level models to compare against. Here, we train deep neural networks to predict human play in 4-in-a-row, a combinatorial game of intermediate complexity, using a data set of 10,874,547 games. We compare these networks to a planning model based on a heuristic function and tree search, and make suggestions for model improvements based on this analysis. This work provides the foundation for estimating a noise ceiling on massive data sets as well as systematically investigating the processes underlying human sequential decision-making.

Improving a model of human planning via large-scale data and deep neural networks

“Slavery ended in the United States because slavery is morally wrong.” This explanation does not seem to fit the typical criteria for explaining an event, since it appeals to ethics rather than causal factors as the reason for this social change. But do people perceive these ethical claims as explanatory, and if so, why? In Study 1, we find that people accept ethical explanations for social change and that this is predicted by their meta-ethical beliefs in moral progress and moral objectivism, suggesting that they treat morality somewhat akin to a causal force. In Study 2, we find that people recognize this relationship between ethical explanations and meta-ethical commitments, using the former to make inferences about individuals’ beliefs in moral progress and objectivism. Together these studies demonstrate that our moral commitments shape our judgments of explanations and that explanations shape our moral inferences about others.

Ethical Explanations

To defend or burnish our moral reputation, we often tell moral narratives. Moral narratives describe morally relevant actions and explanations of those actions, detailing how people acted and why they did so. When and why does communication about moral events include descriptions of peoples’ actions and explanations? We hypothesize that informational, reputational, and presentational goals of narrators shape whether their communication contains clear actions and explanations. We asked a group of “narrators” to communicate with other people following a moral decision. Another group of “audience” members judged them based on their chosen statement. We find that the informational and reputational goals of narrators can explain what information they decide to reveal. Narrators choose what to say based on inferring the audience’s likely perceptions but underestimate how much audiences in fact expect answers to “what” and “why”. Audiences, however, do not always perceive the lack of expected information as indicative of deceit.

Narrating the "what" and "why" of our moral actions

One of the most influential modern theories of morality, Moral Foundations Theory, proposes that morality is formed on innate and shared modular foundations. Psychologists have studied the conceptual development of these moral foundations in childhood, but there exists no comprehensive effort on characterizing the early emergence of moral foundations in naturalistic settings. We explore the emerging order of moral foundations through child and caretaker speech. Using computational methods, we contribute an annotated dataset of moral utterances and find that the individualizing foundations emerge earlier than the binding foundations. Furthermore, caretakers tend to talk more about fairness and degradation, while children talk more about cheating. These results are robust across child gender, family's social class, and race.

The emergence of moral foundations in child language development

Rules undoubtedly guide our moral lives. Simple moral rules prohibit lying, cheating, and stealing, for instance. But the moral mind is more flexible than a theory based only on rule-adherence can account for. In this paper, we look at one particular kind of flexibility: the ability to figure out when it is okay to break a moral rule. We elicit judgments of the moral acceptability of breaking a simple rule: it's wrong to cut in line. We created a video game environment in which agents attempt to gather water -- and sometimes must stand in line behind others to do so. Subjects watch clips of the game being played and make judgments of the moral acceptability of cutting in line across a wide range of spatio-temporally varied and dynamic scenarios. Our data suggests that subjects make judgments by using a generative understanding of the underlying function of the rule about waiting in line. We further show that our data cannot be accounted for by either 1) simple rule adherence or 2) utility maximization.

Flexibility in Moral Cognition: When is it okay to break the rules?

Beyond seemingly lower-level features such as color and motion, visual perception also recovers properties that are more commonly associated with higher-level thought — as when an upwardly accelerating object is seen as self-propelled, and resisting the force of gravity. Past work has explored how speed changes drive the perception of physical forces, but might the reverse also be true? Does seeing a speed change as resisting the force of gravity make us more likely to notice it in the first place? In four experiments, observers were more sensitive to objects’ accelerations when they moved upward (i.e. when those accelerations were opposite to gravity), and they were more sensitive to objects’ decelerations when they moved downward (i.e. when those decelerations appeared as ‘braking’ against gravity). We conclude that the perception of physical forces is not merely an outcome of visual processing, but also determines the perception of other, seemingly lower-level, features of how objects move.

May the Force be against you: Better sensitivity to speed changes opposite to gravity

According to the embodied cognition view, retrieving the meaning of action-related language requires the participation of sensorimotor processes. In consequence, an increasing number of neurostimulation (TMS and tDCS) studies have tried to test this idea. In the present study, we aim to evaluate the evidential value of this body of research (N = 43) by means of p-curve analyses. Our results suggest that the published studies so far do not yet allow to establish if they explore real effects beyond a reasonable doubt. We also found that these studies are quite underpowered (estimated power < 30%), which suggests that a large percentage of these findings are, in fact, false-positive results. In sum, our study suggests that the results derived from brain stimulation studies of embodied semantics are not as reliable as would be desirable. We give some recommendations that will be important for future research on this topic.

Premium content

Downloads

Next from CogSci 2022

A Neural Network Model of Continual Learning with Cognitive Control

Similar lecture

Mechanisms Of Working Memory Allocation In Reward Learning