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Despite the variability of music worldwide, some types of human songs share basic acoustic characteristics. For example, dance songs tend to be loud and rhythmic, whereas lullabies tend to be quiet and melodious. Prior studies with western English-speaking participants have shown that this enables listeners to infer aspects of a singer’s behavior, despite being unfamiliar with the singer’s culture and language. Here, we test whether these intuitions are shared across a diversity of languages and human societies, with 5524 people from 49 industrialised countries comprising 28 languages, and 116 people in 3 small-scale societies with limited access to global media. Each made inferences about the behavioral contexts of 118 songs from 86 societies. Both groups reliably identified the behavioral functions of dance songs, lullabies, and healing songs. Linguistic and geographical proximity between listeners and singers was minimally predictive of accuracy, demonstrating a degree of cultural invariance in music perception.

CogSci 2022

Cultural Invariance in Musical Communication

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**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.

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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.

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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.
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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. 





The subjective value of a choice option is modified by its potential outcomes, when those outcomes will be realized, how likely the outcomes are, and the valence associated with these outcomes (gains, losses). People’s preferences in risky or intertemporal choice are often described by models like hyperbolic discounting, expected utility theory, and prospect theory. This study tested these models by eliciting hypothetical monetary choices along a continuum of tradeoffs between amount versus delay, amount versus risk, and amount to be gained versus amount to be lost. Offering a continuum of options allowed us to test qualitative predictions of the model – for example, a hyperbolic discounting model predicts that participants should never respond in the middle of a continuous scale where payoff is a linear function of delay. The results qualitatively falsify several common models, suggesting that current theories of binary choice are insufficient to account for valuation along a continuum.

Impulsivity, risk-taking, and loss aversion in a continuous response task

The semantic relation between a verb and its argument rapidly impacts language comprehension much like world knowledge and the linguistic context (Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Kutas & Hillyard, 1984; McRae et al., 1998). As part of the socially situated context, register could incrementally modulate comprehension and interact with standard language knowledge processing. Two self-paced reading experiments with an additional picture selection task examined how social-formality contexts and their (mis)matches with register use are comprehended in the presence of verb-argument semantic relation (mis)matches. We assessed whether comprehenders can rapidly adapt to shifting situation formality (Exp 2, N=64), or whether they benefit from habituation enabled by blocked presentation of formality (Exp 1, N=64). We successfully replicated incremental verb-argument (mis)match effects. No significant register effect was found, but the observed picture selection accuracy patterns could be taken to suggest that the processing of social contextual information might impact late sentence processing.

The interplay of situation-formality register congruence and verb-argument relations

One of the key issues in visual word recognition is the role of orthographic overlap in priming. However, most research investigating this topic has focused on priming with orthographic neighbors. In this study, we investigate priming effects of word-final letter overlap and their interaction with word frequency, prime duration, and morphology. In Experiment 1 with briefly presented primes (SOA=34 ms, N = 123), we obtained similar facilitation from non-morphological overlap (compel-TRAVEL) and inflectional suffix overlap (turned-CALLED), regardless of word frequency. In Experiment 2 when primes were fully recognizable (SOA=150 ms, N=123), only non-morphological overlap showed inhibition among lower frequency prime words. These results are inconsistent with predictions of the Interactive Activation model (McCelland and Rumelhart, 1981), and suggest (i) different weights of inhibition and facilitation depending on prime duration and morphological structure of words as well as (ii) the involvement of a reset mechanism in long SOA conditions.

Word-final orthographic priming as a function of word frequency, prime duration, and morphological status

As widely acknowledged in the bilingualism literature, language experience is multifaceted, complex, and dynamic; it cannot be simply reduced to single dimensions or categories. However, cognitive science research outside of bi/multilingualism does not always take into account this fact. Within a population of Hindi-Urdu speakers, we show that proxy categories based on `native speaker' identification or residential history do not neatly map onto patterns of language experience, despite the common assumption that these bring about sufficient homogeneity. Moreover, compared to variables derived from gradient measures of language experience, these proxies do not robustly predict linguistic behavior in the form of acceptability judgments in Hindi-Urdu. In demonstrating alternative approaches to operationalizing language experience, we argue for all language researchers to move past relying on underspecified and ideologically-linked concepts, in favor of more intentional, nuanced, and rigorous testing of experiential factors underlying language processing.

Moving past indirect proxies for language experience: 'Native speaker' and residential history are poor predictors of language behavior

According to the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), people are better at discriminating between speakers of their native language. Although this cognitive effect was largely studied in the literature, experiments have only been conducted on a limited number of language pairs and their results only show the presence of the effect without yielding a gradual measure that may vary across language pairs. In this work, we show that the computational model of LFE introduced by Thorburn, Feldman, and
Schatz (2019) can address these two limitations. In a first experiment, we attest to this model's capacity to obtain a gradual measure of the LFE by replicating behavioural findings on native and accented speech. In a second experiment, we evaluate LFE on a large number of language pairs, including many which have never been tested on humans. We show that the effect is replicated across a wide array of languages, providing further evidence of its universality. Building on the gradual measure of LFE, we also show that languages belonging to the same family yield smaller scores, supporting the idea of an effect of language distance on LFE.


Is the Language Familiarity Effect gradual ? A computational modelling approach

Why do readers typically fixate near the center of a word, with a bias towards word onset? Alhama, Siegelman, Frost, & Armstrong (2019) proposed an account based on (1) perceptual constraints that reduce the likelihood of perceiving a letter the further it is from the fixated location, and (2) the information available from the perceived letters for identifying the word. We expand this work to predict the fixation location distributions of 7-letter words for 43 languages from 9 language families. We found that in the majority of the languages, words were most likely to be correctly recognized when fixating near the center, slightly toward onset. However, there were deviations from this trend, such as predicting more accurate recognition when fixating slightly towards offset in Slavic languages. Our results provide novel predictions for experimental work that considers a flexible language system that optimizes initial fixations based on information theory constraints.

Predicting Fixation Locations in 43 Languages based on Perceptual Constraints and Information Theory

In two eye-tracking pilots during reading, we investigated real-time processing of formality-register congruence and subject-verb morphosyntactic congruence, and their relation. Participants read, in German, two context sentences conveying a formal or informal situation, followed by a target sentence containing a high- or low-register verb (e.g., Engl. transl. "The policeman detained the activist" vs. "The policeman grabbed the activist") which matched or mismatched context formality. The second pilot additionally manipulated subject-verb morphosyntactic congruence (e.g., Engl. transl. "*The policeman detain the activist"; "*The policeman grabbed the activist"). We observed main effects of formality-register and morphosyntactic congruence on verb reading times, as well as an interaction effect at the post-verbal object noun. Higher degrees of context and target sentence formality resulted in longer reading times. Ongoing investigation will further clarify our pilot findings, which suggest some interference between formality-register and morphosyntactic congruence processing.

(How) Do Register and Morphosyntactic Congruence Effects Interact during Sentence Reading? Two Eye-Tracking Pilot Studies

Object-centric interactions provide rich learning moments for young children, including opportunities to discover word meanings. Children’s first-person object handling experiences, in particular, form a key source of input—one that varies across cultures and across development. Using daylong photo streams from child-worn cameras, we analyze >17k images to identify the frequency and targets of child object handling across the first four years in two small-scale subsistence farming communities on opposite sides of the globe (Rossel Papuan and Tseltal Mayan). Overall, we see general consistency in the distribution of object categories (e.g., consumables, mealtime tools, natural objects, etc.) handled by children across cultures and age, likely reflecting stable properties of children’s physical environments and day-to-day routines. However, the exact objects available to children vary both within and across communities and diversify with age. These various distributions of handling patterns are discussed in their relation to potential consequences for early learning.

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Impulsivity, risk-taking, and loss aversion in a continuous response task

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Children infer the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs