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Lexical production research has relied extensively on in- person naming experiments such as Picture Word Interference (PWI). While the interference effects observed in the standard paradigm have been well-attested, PWI experiments have tra- ditionally been underpowered, owing to limitations associated with large-scale data collection. In this study, we validate a scalable, typing time-based PWI paradigm that can be de- ployed on the internet, and enables high-powered replications of the interference effects observed in the spoken modality. We also propose an automated response coding process that in- corporates production errors such as incorrect responses and restarts, and can be leveraged to illuminate aspects of response conflict and correction processes in incremental production.

CogSci 2023

Typing time PWI: A scalable paradigm for studying lexical production

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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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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)
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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.

When two arguments of a sentence vary in length, speakers of SOV languages prefer to place the longer argument before the shorter one leading to a long-before-short word order. The functional motivation behind such an ordering choice has been provided by two opposing accounts. According to the first account, long-before-short order makes production efficient by keeping syntactic heads and dependents close to each other (dependency locality). The alternate account argues that long-before-short order is a product of increased conceptual accessibility of long arguments during production. In this work, we test the predictions made by the two accounts by comparing ordering choices in Hindi transitive sentences containing object modifying post-nominal relative clauses (RCs). Results reveal that it is efficiency and not accessibility that determines word order during production. These findings add to the body of work that argues for an overarching influence of working memory constraints on both comprehension and production.

Dependency Locality Influences Word Order During Production in SOV Languages: Evidence from Hindi

Lexical entrainment is a phenomenon in which people tend to re-use the words used by conversational partners (Brennan & Clark, 1996). It is explained as either an automatic reaction caused by priming (Pickering & Garrod, 2004), or a strategic behavior where two interlocutors achieve conceptual agreements for communicative purposes (Brennan & Clark, 1996). Past studies suggest that speakers tend to entrain more when interacting with listeners with lower language competence, such as computers (Branigan, Pickering, Pearson, McLean, & Brown, 2011), children (Cai, Sun, & Zhao, 2021), and non-native partners (Cai et al., 2021; Suffill, Kutasi, Pickering, & Branigan, 2021). However, few studies have explored how the features of speakers themselves determine the pattern of entrainment, and the studies that do exist suggest that speaker proficiency (as opposed to listener proficiency) may not affect entrainment behavior. In this study, we target bilingual groups and explore individual differences in lexical entrainment by looking at their entrainment behavior with picture matching and naming tasks. Over the course of two experiments, we investigate English entrainment in English-speaking bilinguals, as well as Mandarin entrainment in Mandarin-English bilinguals. Unlike the previous literature, our results suggest that a speaker’s language dominance/proficiency may have an effect on that speaker’s entrainment: bilinguals who are less dominant/proficient in English tend to entrain more in English, although the effect in Mandarin did not reach significance.

Lexical Entrainment in Bilingual Language Use

In Mandarin Chinese, abbreviation happens commonly to compound words across different syntactic categories. What is the motivation behind this shortening of words? This paper presents an investigation of this phenomenon from an information-theoretic point of view. A corpus study was con- ducted to measure the average amount of information contained in the full (long) form and the abbreviated (short) form of words given certain contexts. The amount of information was then compared between the long and short forms of a word, revealing that the short one usually contains less information, and therefore is more likely to be used in more predictive contexts. This result indicates that speakers of Chinese can choose to use shorter words when the context is more predictive, in accordance with considerations of efficiency.

Chinese words shorten in more predictive contexts

A long tradition of studies in psycholinguistics has examined the formation and generalization of ad hoc conventions in reference games, showing how newly acquired conventions for a given target transfer to new referential contexts. However, another axis of generalization remains understudied: How do conventions formed for one target transfer to completely distinct targets, when specific lexical choices are unlikely to repeat? This paper presents two dyadic studies $(N=240$) that address this axis of generalization, focusing on the role of nameability --- the a priori likelihood that two individuals will share the same label. We leverage the recently-released \kilogram dataset, a collection of abstract tangram images that is orders of magnitude larger than previously available, exhibiting high diversity of properties like nameability. Our first study asks how nameability shapes convention formation, while the second asks how new conventions generalize to entirely new targets of reference.

Semantic uncertainty guides the extension of conventions to new referents

How is it that humans can solve complex planning tasks so efficiently despite limited cognitive resources? One reason is its ability to know how to use its limited computational resources to make clever choices. 
We postulate that people learn this ability from trial and error (metacognitive reinforcement learning). Here, we systematize models of the underlying learning mechanisms and enhance them with more sophisticated additional mechanisms. We fit the resulting 86 models to human data collected in previous experiments where different phenomena of metacognitive learning were demonstrated and performed Bayesian model selection. Our results suggest that a gradient ascent through the space of cognitive strategies can explain most of the observed qualitative phenomena, and is therefore a promising candidate for explaining the mechanism underlying metacognitive learning.

What are the mechanisms underlying metacognitive learning?

Whether timing affects contingency learning is currently poorly understood. Specifically, does temporal predictability aid the acquisition of contingencies? We asked participants in a music contingency learning task to respond to the target (the name of a note) while ignoring tones. To assess whether temporal predictability influences the acquisition of these contingencies, we manipulated the temporal context of tone presentation in two experiments. In Experiment 1, one group of participants listened to tones presented with a regular temporal interval (1000 ms between each trial), while the other group listened to tones presented in a random manner (random intervals selected between 600 and 1400 ms). In Experiment 2 we manipulated the temporal presentation of the tones within trials: one group listened to tones with a 300 ms fixed interval between the cue and the target, and the other group with an interval randomly selected between 0 and 600 ms. Although participants learned to associate pitch labels in both experiments this occurred independently of the timing manipulations. These results confirm prior evidence on contingency learning but do not show the effects of temporal predictability in this learning context.

The role of temporal predictability in contingency learning

We examined bilingual students’ test-taking strategies through an eye-tracking experiment. 71 university students with different levels of English (L2) proficiency attempted carefully selected multiple-choice and structured questions on their Biology knowledge. Their eye movement behavior was captured during the process and analyzed using both summary statistics of eye movement measures and gaze transition consistency as measured in entropy using Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM) to infer their test-taking strategies, which were then correlated with test performance measured in accuracy and reaction time. Results generally showed that eye movement behavior during test taking was associated with performance. In particular, gaze transition consistency predicted performance beyond summary statistics of eye movement measures. However, language proficiency was not associated with eye movement behavior or performance. These results may imply that participants’ moment-by-moment, flexible problem-solving strategies when taking the test would better predict their performance than their underlying language proficiency.

Bilingual students’ test-taking strategies in content subject assessments

People need to generate and test hypotheses in order to create accurate representations of their environments. But how do they know which hypotheses to consider when there are often infinitely many possibilities? Here we explore the idea that evolutionary mental representation generation and selection processes – responsible for the generation of both local (i.e., within a task) and global (i.e., about a task) representations – enable people to address this problem. We investigated this through an active learning experiment, where participants’ task was to discover a hidden rule determining the behavior of a simple physical system. Specifically, we aimed to manipulate factors that constrain this process, particularly through experimental instructions and feedback. We found that providing more opportunities for participants to recognize when their initial task conceptualization was wrong and adjust it helped them create more accurate representations about the task, which in turn led to better accuracy within the task.

How do instructions, examples, and testing shape task representations?

In this paper we study human sequential behavior by integrating cognitive, evolutionary, and computational approaches. Our work centers around the emergence of shared vocabularies in the Embodied Communication Game (ECG). In this game, participant pairs solve a shared task without access to conventional means of communication, enforcing the emergence of a new communication system. This problem is solved typically by negotiating a shared set of sequential signals that acquire meaning through interactions. Individual differences in Personal Need for Structure (PNS) have been found to influence how this process develops. We trained deep learning models to mimic the emergence of these systems and used hyperparameter optimization to approximate latent human cognitive variables to explain human behavior. We demonstrate that models based on bidirectional LSTM networks are better at capturing human behavior than unidirectional LSTM networks. This suggests that human sequence processing in the ECG is influenced by expected future states. The approximated variables cannot explain the effects of PNS, but we do provide evidence suggesting that random and uncertainty-directed exploration strategies are combined to develop optimal behavior.

Modeling Human Sequential Behavior with Deep Neural Networks in Emergent Communication

There is an apparent discrepancy between visual perception, which is colorful, complete, and in high resolution, and the saccadic, and spatially heterogeneous retinal input data. In this work, we computationally emulated foveated color maps and intensity channels as well as intra-saccadic motion data using a neuromorphic event camera. We used a convolutional neural network, U-Net, and adversarial optimization to demonstrate how retinal inputs can be used for the reconstruction of colorful images in high resolution. Our model may set the groundwork toward the development of biologically plausible neural networks for computational vision perception.

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Dependency Locality Influences Word Order During Production in SOV Languages: Evidence from Hindi

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