United States

Psycholinguistic studies are now more frequently considering the role of embodied information in language processing. While the perceptual features of nouns lend themselves well to cataloguing and norming, verbs also contain important perceptual information that may be useful to researchers. We present preliminary analyses of an ongoing study norming the directionality and strength of motion implied by verbs in three dimensions. We sought to assess the convergent and divergent validity of our pilot database using data derived from other psycholinguistic norm databases and distributional semantic techniques. Results suggest that this norming method is supported by convergent validity while capturing unique psycholinguistic information. More specifically, these norms may contribute to stimulus selection and refinement, generating computational representations of verbs, and novel research designs in future studies.

CogSci 2023

The spatial role of verbs in embodied language processing

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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.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

**Your Program Chairs,**
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**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


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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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/)
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#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Mathematical concepts are paragons of abstraction. The actual practice of mathematics, though, is decidedly concrete, material, one might even say fleshy. This raises the question, What is the body doing, when the body is doing mathematics? We answer by analyzing a video corpus of mathematicians in their natural habitat: at the blackboard, chalk in hand. Mixing qualitative and quantitative analyses, we describe systematically the ways mathematicians use their bodies to write, move, and gesture. Some surprises arise, such as the observation that mathematicians point nearly constantly but seldom produce representational gestures; and that they spend most of their time away from the blackboard at which they are writing. We discuss implications for creativity, mathematical cognition, and theories of embodied and distributed cognition more broadly.

What does the body do, when it's doing mathematics?

Current approaches to empathetic response generation typically encode the entire dialogue history directly and put the output into a decoder to generate friendly feedback. These methods focus on modelling contextual information but neglect capturing the direct intention of the speaker. We argue that the last utterance in the dialogue empirically conveys the intention of the speaker. Consequently, we propose a novel model named InferEM for empathetic response generation. We separately encode the last utterance and fuse it with the entire dialogue through the multi-head attention based intention fusion module to capture the speaker's intention. Besides, we utilize previous utterances to predict the last utterance, which simulates human's psychology to guess what the interlocutor may speak in advance. To balance the optimizing rates of the utterance prediction and response generation, a multi-task learning strategy is designed for InferEM. Experimental results demonstrate the plausibility and validity of InferEM in improving empathetic expression.

InferEM: Inferring the Speaker's Intention for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

Which auditory features drive everyday listeners’ preferences for and emotional experiences of their favorite music? To test how various features contribute to listeners’ experiences of popular music, we created a novel corpus of covers of 50 popular songs from 2008 to 2019, capturing a wide variety of genres and styles. Cover versions of popular songs offer a rich space of natural musical stimuli that match original songs on some dimensions (e.g., lyrics) but not others (e.g., genre). We pseudo-randomly selected one cover per song and asked subjects to rate similarity between clips of original and cover versions. Other subjects rated emotional valence and arousal of the same clips. We found a relationship between similarity ratings and differences in arousal ratings between originals and covers (p = 0.00069) but not differences in valence ratings (p = 0.27), suggesting that similarity ratings are more driven by perceived arousal differences.

Quantifying the Influence of Musical Features on Perceptual Similarity of Popular Songs

Previous research has found emotional colour connotations (red=negative, green=positive) to rapidly impact emotional judgements of faces presented in different colour contexts. However, it remains unclear whether this influence is reciprocal. We consider differences in processing speed and difficulty between perceptual (colour) and conceptual (emotion) stimuli to determine whether emotion information influences colour processing. We examined whether emotional face primes (angry/happy/neutral) influence red-green colour judgements and if this effect is greater under increased ambiguity of the colour stimuli. The findings suggest that primed emotional information can guide colour judgements. Specifically, happy face primes led to better categorisation accuracy for predominantly green stimuli, while angry face primes led to better categorisation accuracy for predominantly red stimuli. For ambiguous colour stimuli, a categorisation response bias was found for green following happy face primes. Our findings provide support for a reciprocal influence of emotional stimuli on colour judgements.

Emotional face priming influences colour judgements

A large body of evidence demonstrates that emotion impacts memory. Although visual information dominates emotional memories, previous studies have not examined the role of visual imagery as an individual difference variable in the representation of emotional memories. This study examines the role of visual imagery skills (namely, object and spatial imagery) on emotional memories. Participants (N = 115) recalled positive, negative, and neutral events in response to the cue words and then rated the phenomenological characteristics of each event. Event accounts were coded for episodic detail categories (event, place, perceptual, time, emotion-thought details). The results showed that visual imagery skills contributed to the remembrance of the episodic details of positive memories and the phenomenology of both positive and negative events. Overall, this study emphasizes the importance of considering the individual differences in memory research and highlights the differences between emotional and neutral events.

Exploring the Role of Visual Imagery in the Recall of Emotional Autobiographical Memories

In many cultures, adults use simple, slow, and dynamic speech when talking to infants ("parentese," or infant-directed speech) and make expansive, repetitive movements when demonstrating object properties to infants ("motionese," or infant-directed actions). These modifications enhance infants’ attention to and learning about language and goal-directed actions. Adults’ interactions with infants are also full of emotions –– do adults also modify their emotional expressions when interacting with infants? Here we showed parents of infants (aged 6 to 14 months; N = 25) emotion-evoking pictures including colorful bubbles, adorable stuffed animals, yummy snacks, broken toys, dangerous fire, and rotten fruits. We asked parents to describe their feelings about these pictures either to their infant or to an adult partner (i.e., an experimenter). While the parents’ use of emotion words did not differ between conditions, their emotional expressions did: Their infant-directed emotional expressions were more positive when they discussed positive pictures and more negative when they discussed negative pictures compared to their adult-directed emotional expressions. These findings suggest that besides "parentese" and "motionese," there is also a unique form of emotional communication in parent-child interaction – "emotionese."

Adults tailor their emotional expressions to infants through "emotionese"

Previous research suggests that negative emotions invoked by failure feedback might lead people to tune out from the task, which is detrimental to their learning. However, failure feedback is pervasive in the real world and we need to identify ways we can learn from it optimally. In the current study, the participants’ (n = 218) task expectations were randomly set to be easy or hard. Then, the participants solved a novel type of equation problems that involved manipulation of researcher-invented symbols, followed by either success (“You solved the equations CORRECTLY!”) or failure feedback (“You solved the equations INCORRECTLY!”). Next, the participants were provided instruction about the rules of the equation tasks and solved posttest questions across two rounds. Across different learning outcomes, we identify the cases in which the influence of feedback is moderated by task difficulty expectations (on identical items), failure feedback results in equally high performance with success feedback (on isomorphic items), and participants learn better when they receive failure than success feedback (at a new independent task). We conclude that the tune-out reactions to failure during feedback might be diminished, and even be reversed, after feedback.

Influences of Task Expectations and Failure Feedback on Learning from Subsequent Tasks

The present study investigated the effect of mindfulness on response inhibition, and its interaction with emotions. Individuals with prior experience in mindfulness meditation and those without any meditation experience participated. During a stop signal task, participants responded to a target stimulus on go trials and inhibited responding on stop trials. An emotional face (angry, happy, or neutral) always preceded the target stimulus, which was to be ignored. Participants also completed self-reports associated with affect, awareness, and impulsivity. There were no group differences on any self-report. The task results showed that happy faces enhanced response inhibition in non-meditators, whereas angry faces enhanced response inhibition in mindfulness meditators. Results are explained through functional perspectives of how mindfulness influences attentional resource deployment to emotional stimuli, affecting response processes over time. The findings contribute to understanding the dynamic patterns through which mindfulness modulates the attention-emotion interface to promote meaning in the face of difficulty.

Mindfulness Skill Enhances Inhibition of Irrelevant Negative Emotions: Evidence from a Stop Signal Task

Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from generalized anxiety disorder. Inhibition is the most studied executive function in anxiety disorders and research has shown that elevated levels of anxiety are related to slower response times on tasks assessing inhibition. The aim of the present study was to compare inhibitory control toward emotional words, including those eliciting anxiety, in naturally cycling (NC) women and women taking different kinds of oral contraceptives (OC), androgenic and anti-androgenic OC. We present two phases of one study: a cross-sectional phase with 240 women and a daily diary phase with 89 women. Inhibitory control was measured by an Emotional Stroop task in the two phases. In both phases, there was no difference in anxiety levels between groups. However, the cross-sectional study showed that in women taking anti-androgenic OC, the higher the level of anxiety, the longer the reaction time on the Stroop task. The daily diary study showed that anti-androgenic OC users had slower response times on all the categories of words, compared to androgenic OC users. Further studies should focus on the link between different kinds of OC and inhibitory control as it can be linked to anxiety symptoms in women.

Impaired Inhibitory Control in Women Taking Anti-Androgenic Oral Contraceptives – Implications for Anxiety

This paper proposes and tests a method to study people’s blame attributions displayed in ‘Tweets’. Artificial intelligence (AI) incidents were chosen as they are a contemporary topic that is often talked about on Twitter, and are a “problem of many hands”, where multiple different agents bring about an outcome. The benefit of the method is that it was able to replicate and contextualize findings from experimental settings. For example, AIs get blamed more for negative outcomes, whilst humans get blamed for their intention. Another benefit of the approach was that it was able to identify novel factors that haven't been previously studied experimentally. For example, people were willing to directly blame data for being biased and blamed AI for replacing humans. The proposed method can serve as a way of avoiding entrenched measurement bias within a specific field by allowing researchers to update their frameworks with novel factors.


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What does the body do, when it's doing mathematics?

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