United States

Confidence is an important concept in cognitive science, as it integrates seamlessly with our beliefs, goals, and decisions. However, the dynamics of how beliefs about hypotheses (represented by a Bayesian posterior probability distribution) give rise to explicitly reported confidence judgments about predictions (which are typically measured on various numerical scales) in the human mind is not well understood. In this work, we report findings on this question from a concept learning and confidence judgment experiment. We compare how leading theories in the present literature stands against our data and propose some new model-based measurements and future directions for predicting humans&#39; confidence judgments.

CogSci 2023

Towards a model of confidence judgements

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>
<html><button style="display: inline-flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; white-space: nowrap; border-radius: 9999px; font-weight: bold; background: #7c3aed; color: white; font-family: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif; height: 40px; font-size: 16px; padding: 0 20px; border: none; cursor: pointer" onclick="window.open('https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing')">Conference Handbook</button></html>
<br><br><br><br>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. <br>Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline -  subject line "Welcome to ACL 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) first.

Registration Required

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.

Confidence is an important concept in cognitive science, as it integrates seamlessly with our beliefs, goals, and decisions. However, the dynamics of how beliefs about hypotheses (represented by a Bayesian posterior probability distribution) give rise to explicitly reported confidence judgments about predictions (which are typically measured on various numerical scales) in the human mind is not well understood. In this work, we report findings on this question from a concept learning and confidence judgment experiment. We compare how leading theories in the present literature stands against our data and propose some new model-based measurements and future directions for predicting humans' confidence judgments.

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.<br>
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!

<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
<br><br>

#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/tzgk/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>
<br>

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

During class, taking notes helps the encoding process, especially when students reformulate what is presented. After class, notes can be used for revision. Previous studies, mostly conducted in laboratory contexts, showed that note-taking on paper seems to be more efficient than on computer, probably because students are more likely to reformulate on paper. The originality of this study is to investigate students’ perceptions and strategies depending on their note-taking method during but also after class. Data of 108 students showed that students on paper (30%) declare making more reformulations and less multitasking that students on computer (70%). After class, review sheets are written for a large majority of the students on paper, whatever the method they used during class. These results suggest that even if computer is the most used method during class, paper is still used after class, and with paper are associated better strategies.

Note-taking during and after class: which strategies for which method?

Science teaching is a complex socio-cognitive practice, where teachers simultaneously collaborate with and influence student minds. This process is distributed across textbooks, explanations, blackboard activities, classroom dynamics, student questions, student performance, etc.; and enactive, as teachers act out scientific mechanisms using descriptions, gestures, teaching props, models etc. This complex process of Teacher Cognition (TC) is not well understood, as existing studies are disparate, and based on disjointed approaches. The lack of a TC theory limits the design of systematic education policies - currently based on intuitions about teacher cognition - leading to policy guidelines that teachers find difficult to implement. Recent developments in embodied/enactive cognition theory – particularly the enactive simulation model of language and the enactive simulation theory of other minds – provide useful ways to develop models of TC, especially related to science teaching. Here we extend and develop a finer-grained version of a recent enactive model of TC, using classroom data.

Teacher Cognition: A Model of How Teachers Build Distributed and Enactive Narratives, to Generate and Finetune Mechanism Concepts in Student Minds

The goal of this study was to revisit the nature and role of image schemata in language use. Image schemas have often been thought to be low-level quasi-primitives that structure much of language and thought (Johnson, 1987; Oakley 2010). We queried naive participants’ intuitions about various verbs and their denoted events having visuospatial orientations that can be horizontal, vertical, or some combination or modification of those orientations. The results of our survey show robust consistency among people’s intuitions and suggest that image schemas are dynamic, flexible, and may be combined to compose new ones.

Looking at image schemas: Combinations and modifications

This study investigated how observing pitch gestures conveying lexical tones and representational gestures conveying word meanings when learning L2 Mandarin words differing in lexical tone affects their subsequent semantic and phonological processing in L1 English speakers using the N400 event-related potential (ERP). Larger N400s for English target words mismatching vs. matching Mandarin prime words in meaning were observed for words learned with pitch and representational gesture, but not no gesture. Additionally, larger N400s for Mandarin target words mismatching vs. matching Mandarin prime words in lexical tone were observed for words learned with pitch gesture, but not representational or no gesture. These findings provide the first ERP evidence that observing gestures conveying phonological and semantic information during L2 word learning enhances subsequent phonological and semantic processing of learned L2 words.

Observing Gestures During L2 Word Learning Facilitates Implicit Differentiation Between Unfamiliar Speech Sounds and Word Meanings

One aspect of context on cognition and memory that has been understudied is the influence of temporal context. The temporal contexts used in this study were different times of the year. More specifically, given that we were dealing with a largely Roman Catholic population, we operationalized temporal context in terms of two religious seasons, Lent and Ordinary Time. For this study, we assessed experience of, and memory for, representational and abstract art as a function of whether there was temporal congruity or incongruity. Temporal context did influence memory for perceptual details but not the experience of art during viewing, or gist and autobiographical memory. Thus, temporal context can influence cognition, but the scope of this influence is limited.

Temporal Context and the Experience and Memory of Art

Very few studies have focused on the stimulus materials for social situations to understand if contextual cues have impacts on the gaze pattern of children with ASD to investigate the emotion recognition performance. This study investigated the performance across 2 age groups (preschool, school age) between ASD and typically developing (TD) children by using eye-tracking techniques and recording recognition accuracy for different area of interests (AOI). The performance of ASD (n=91) and TD (n=155) participants were observed while asked to identify emotions in a context, including happy, sad, anger, fear, and surprise. The results showed no significant relationship between age and correct rate; but ASD groups actually spent more time on faces to recognize emotions compared to TD groups. The findings highlighted the greater effects of social experience on TD groups, leading to correctly identify emotions despite less gazing time at faces.

Emotion Recognition and Gaze Pattern of Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Children

Response inhibition refers to the ability to suppress a prepotent response. Studies investigating the role of emotional information in response inhibition have yielded inconsistent results; some studies have shown that positive emotion, compared to negative, facilitates inhibitory control, while other studies have shown opposite effects. We resolve this debate by hypothesizing that the scope of attention with which emotional information is processed can explain these mixed results. We combined a stop signal task with a global-local Navon task. Participants were required to detect a target presented at either a global or local perceptual level (letters H, S, and T). Occasionally, they encountered a stop signal face with irrelevant angry, happy, or neutral expressions. We found that irrelevant happy facial expression impaired inhibitory control compared to angry facial expression under global processing; however, this effect got reversed under local processing, i.e., happy faces facilitated inhibitory control compared to angry faces.

Irrelevant happy faces facilitate and interfere with inhibitory control under a narrow and a broad scope of attention, respectively.

Languages seem to be designed for efficient communication. For example, shorter forms are used for more predictable meanings, a tendency argued to stem from speakers’ efficient language use. However, no study to date has systematically tested whether communicative efficiency shapes children’s language use. Investigating whether such a pressure is already present in children will shed light on the development of children’s’ communicative behaviour and the respective roles of adults and children in shaping language structure. Here, we investigate the development of communicative efficiency using a novel experimental paradigm with children ages 4-10. Results show that communicative efficiency is attested already in young children and becomes more adult-like with age: as children grow, they are more likely to shorten messages (minimize effort) when a short message is sufficient for accurate communication. We discuss the implications of our results for cognitive development and for theories of language evolution and change.

Communicative efficiency is present in young children and becomes more adult-like with age

This study sought to determine if a child’s inventory of denominal verbs (e.g., swing as a verb) at 42 and 54 months are predicted by their inventory of related nouns (e.g., swing as a noun) at 30 months and whether these relationships are different for late talking and typically developing children. Keywords consisting of denominal verbs and related nouns were extracted from 42 late talking and 44 typically developing children at 30, 42, and 54 months. Preliminary results revealed that related noun inventories at 30 months predict denominal verb inventories at 42 months. However, related noun inventories at 30 months do not predict denominal verb inventories at 54 months. These results suggest that differences in noun inventories are linked to denominal verb inventories regardless of language status, but only in an early window of development.

Noun Today, Verb Tomorrow: Differences in the Expressive Noun Inventories of Late Talking and Typically Developing 30-Month-Olds Predicts Expressive Denominal Verb Inventories

Many studies show that language comprehenders track multiple object state-changes during event comprehension. In this research, we investigate if comprehenders are sensitive to object state-changes of semantically similar objects. In Experiments 1 to 3, participants were asked to verify whether the object depicted in a picture was mentioned in the previously read sentence. Crucially, the picture either showed the original/modified state of an object that was mentioned in the sentence (Experiment 1) or not (Experiments 2 and 3). In Experiment 1, participants were faster to verify that an object was mentioned in the sentence if its pictured state matched the state implied by the sentence. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants were slower to verify pictured objects (e.g., cake) after reading a sentence that implied multiple states for a semantically similar (e.g., egg) rather than dissimilar (e.g., thermometer) object. Thus, comprehenders are sensitive to object state-changes of semantically similar objects.

Premium content

Downloads

Next from CogSci 2023

Note-taking during and after class: which strategies for which method?

Similar lecture

Confidence as Control: A Survey of Confidence Utilization in Large Language Models