Netherlands

While people may be reluctant to explicitly state social stereotypes, their underlying beliefs may nonetheless leak out in subtler conversational cues, such as surprisal reactions that convey information about expectations. Across 3 experiments with adults and children (ages 4-9), we compare permissive responses (&quot;Sure, you can have that one&quot;) that vary the presence of surprisal cues (interjections &quot;oh!&quot; and disfluencies &quot;um&quot;). In Experiment 1 (n = 120), children by 6-to-7 use surprisal reactions to infer that a boy more likely made a counter-stereotypical choice. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate that these cues are sufficient for children (n = 120) and adults (n = 80) to learn a novel expectation about a group of aliens. In Experiment 3, adults (n = 150) use the distribution of surprisal information to infer whether a novel behavior is gender-stereotyped. Across these experiments, we see emerging evidence that conversational feedback may provide a crucial and unappreciated avenue for the transmission of social beliefs.0

CogSci 2024

“Oh! Um. . . Sure”: Children and adults use other’s linguistic surprisal to reason about expectations and learn stereotypes

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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EMNLP 2024

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While people may be reluctant to explicitly state social stereotypes, their underlying beliefs may nonetheless leak out in subtler conversational cues, such as surprisal reactions that convey information about expectations. Across 3 experiments with adults and children (ages 4-9), we compare permissive responses ("Sure, you can have that one") that vary the presence of surprisal cues (interjections "oh!" and disfluencies "um"). In Experiment 1 (n = 120), children by 6-to-7 use surprisal reactions to infer that a boy more likely made a counter-stereotypical choice. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate that these cues are sufficient for children (n = 120) and adults (n = 80) to learn a novel expectation about a group of aliens. In Experiment 3, adults (n = 150) use the distribution of surprisal information to infer whether a novel behavior is gender-stereotyped. Across these experiments, we see emerging evidence that conversational feedback may provide a crucial and unappreciated avenue for the transmission of social beliefs.0

technical paper

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was an in-person meeting held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands at the Postillion Hotel & Conference Centre.

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**Thursday, July 25** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Morgan Barense on Enhancing real-world event memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/17997/lecture/99084-dynamics-between-minds-and-the-environment) 
1000: [Gleitman Award Winner Isabelle Dautriche on Language Foundations: Insights from acquisition, communication, cognition, and more](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18000/lecture/99085-gleitman-talk) 
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
1700: [Rumelhart Prize Presentation Speaker Alison Gopnik on Exploit, explore, empower: Three ages and three intelligences](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18028/lecture/99161-rp1-rumelhart-prize-presentation) 

**Friday, July 26** 
0900: [C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize Keynote Speaker Kia Nobre on Focusing in memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18035/lecture/99162-hp1-c-l-de-carvalho-heineken-prize-keynote-address) 
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
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1745: [Keynote Speaker Andrea E. Martin on Neural dynamics encode the structure and statistics of language](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18077/lecture/99271-neural-dynamics-encode-the-structure-and-statistics-of-language) 

**Saturday, July 27** 
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#### **Letter from the President**

Welcome to the 2024 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Rotterdam! CogSci 2024 brings together a large community of cognitive scientists who have traveled here from around the world, as well as a smaller group of remote presenters. I would like to extend an especially warm welcome to our first-time CogSci meeting attendees, and hope that 
their experience inspires them to join our future meetings for many years to come.

I want to thank this year’s conference co-chairs, Larissa K Samuelson, Stefan Frank, Mariya Toneva, Allyson Mackey, and Eliot Hazeltine, for putting together an amazing series of invited talks and symposia around the theme of Dynamics of Cognition. The co-chairs also deserve credit for handling a record-breaking number of submissions and producing a truly exciting conference program 

Beyond the invited talks and symposia dedicated to this year’s conference theme, I would like to highlight the presentations and events honoring the 
Rumelhart, Elman, Gleitman and C .L . de Carvalho Heineken prize winners, including the Rumelhart reception on Thursday. As you may know, we are recording all of the invited talks and symposia, and all prize-winners’ talks, and will be making this content available after the conference. 

The Cognitive Science Society relies on the volunteer efforts of our Governing Board members who work on matters related to our membership; conference policies; diversity and inclusion, international, and outreach initiatives; prizes and much more. We welcome interest from Society members who would like to become more involved in what we do. The 
Society is deeply grateful to Rick Dale and Andrea Bender, who serve as editors of the two Society journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science respectively. We especially acknowledge our editors’ generosity in donating their stipends each year to D&I and outreach efforts. 

This year’s Annual Meeting depends critically on the support of Marischal De Armond and his team at Podium Conference Specialists: Sharon Zwack, Cendrine De Vis, Sarah-Kate Burke, and Rachel Waller worked tirelessly to secure the venue and handled a multitude of logistical and organizational issues, from arranging coffee breaks and receptions to making sure that a huge number of posters fits comfortably into the available space. Finally, and importantly, I would like to acknowledge the Cognitive Science Society Executive Officer, Erica Wojcik, for managing the complex and ever expanding sphere of our Society’s activities.

I hope you enjoy this year’s meeting and the many different opportunities to engage with the vibrant community of cognitive scientists gathered here. I also hope you get a chance to explore the great city of Rotterdam with its many attractions, museums, restaurants and scenic views. If you’d like to talk more about our Society, or simply want to say hello, please stop by!

![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/3c66d0e21fff30e204df1138ffd15173.jpeg)

**Anna Papafragou** 
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

**CODE OF CONDUCT** 
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**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY** 
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.

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The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Outward differences between cultures are very salient, with Western and East Asian cultures as a prominent comparison pair. A large literature describes cross-cultural variation in cognition, but relatively less research has explored the developmental origins of this variation. This study helps to fill the empirical gap by replicating four prominent findings documenting cross-cultural differences in children’s reasoning, visual attention, and social cognition in a cross-sectional sample of 240 3-12-year-olds from the US and China. We observe cross-cultural differences in three of the four tasks and describe the distinct developmental trajectory that each task follows throughout early and middle childhood.0

Cognitive diversity in context: US-China differences in children’s reasoning, visual attention, and social cognition

The amount of resources someone has can influence their emotional responses to events. Two preregistered experiments investigated whether adults and children consider others' resource quantities when inferring their emotions. Sixty adults (Experiment 1) and 135 8-10-year-olds (Experiment 2) saw stories about people wanting an item but differing in the number of items they have enough money to buy (ranging from 1 to 5). Participants rated how these people felt both when buying the item and when losing it. Both adults and children judged that the fewer resources someone has, the sadder they felt  when the item was lost, and the bigger emotional change they experienced (relative to when buying the item). Adults also judged that the impact of resource scarcity on emotion was most significant when the person had depleted all their resources, as opposed to still retaining some to influence the negative outcome, and this pattern is emerging in children. These findings suggest that even when the same negative event occurs, adults and children as young as 8 consider others' available resources when inferring their emotional responses to the event.0

Children and Adults Consider Others’ Resources When Inferring Their Emotions

We provide a generalized, normative model of visual detection that accounts for key asymmetries between decisions about presence and about absence. In our model, decisions about presence are made based on the visibility of presented stimuli, but decisions about absence are made based on counterfactual visibility: beliefs about the degree to which a stimulus would have been visible if present. Behavioral patterns in visual detection experiments under different levels of partial occlusion validate key model predictions. Specifically, we find that unlike decisions about presence, the confidence and speed of decisions about absence are largely independent of perceptual evidence, but are sensitive to the counterfactual visibility of absent stimuli. Finally, we reveal robust individual differences in counterfactual perception, with some participants systematically incorporating counterfactual visibility into perceptual decisions in a different fashion from others. We discuss implications for the varied and inferential nature of visual perception more broadly.0

The role of counterfactual visibility in inference about absence

Comparison of visibility inferences across congenitally blind and sighted people provides insight into the contribution of first-person sensory experience to intuitive theories. We hypothesized that both groups understand others’ visual experiences via an intuitive theory incorporating variables known to influence visual psychophysics (distance, looking duration, and feature size). Adults born blind (n=20) and sighted (n=40) listened to short scenarios that described an observer looking at another person from different distances and for varying durations. Participants rated how likely the observer would perceive appearance features of the person that varied in size (e.g., eye color vs. hat). A probabilistic formalization of intuitive visibility fit the ratings with high accuracy across scenarios and features. Model parameters were qualitatively identical across groups but blind adults weighted distance and size less. A quantitative and generative intuitive theory of vision develops without first-person sensory access, possibly through linguistic communication, and is fine-tuned by visual experience.0

A formal model of intuitive theories of vision in congenitally blind and sighted adults

'Causal perception' describes the phenomenon wherein certain interactions between objects are automatically and irresistibly experienced as involving cause and effect. Previous work using retinotopically-specific visual adaptation paradigms has provided evidence that there is at least one specific causal event, 'launching', which is identified sufficiently early in visual processing that the visual system still operates using the surface of the retina as its frame of reference. Here, we demonstrate that there are in fact multiple 'causal perceptions', such that the visual system also detects a category of event described as 'entraining'. Using a novel ambiguous 'launch/push' display, we find that adapting to launching events leads to more ‘pushing’ reports, while adapting to entraining events leads to more 'launching' reports, and that these adaptation effects only occur for test events presented to the same location on the retina as the adaptation stream (i.e., are retinotopically specific). We discuss the implications of this finding for future work on causal perception and cognition.0

The human visual system encodes multiple mutually exclusive categories of cause and effect interaction

Aesthetic appreciation is inherently multidimensional: many different stimulus dimensions (e.g., colors, shapes, sizes) contribute to our aesthetic experience. However, most studies in empirical aesthetics used either non-parametrically controlled multidimensional or parametrically controlled unidimensional stimuli, preventing insight into the relative contribution of each stimulus dimension or any potential interactions between them to perceptual and aesthetic evaluations. To adress this gap we combined two recent developments: the Order & Complexity Toolbox for Aesthetics (Van Geert, Bossens, & Wagemans, 2023) for generating multidimensional parametrically controlled stimuli, and Gibbs Sampling with People (Harrison et al., 2020) for efficiently characterizing subjective evaluations in multidimensional stimulus space. We show the advantages of this new approach by estimating multidimensional probability distributions for both aesthetic (pleasure and interest) and perceptual evaluations (order and complexity) in two visual multidimensional parametric stimulus spaces, and we compare our results with findings from earlier studies that used either non-parametric or unidimensional stimuli.0

Using Gibbs Sampling with People to characterize perceptual and aesthetic evaluations in multidimensional visual stimulus space

The creation of sophisticated AI systems that are able to process and produce images and text creates new challenges in assessing the capabilities of those systems. We adapt a behavioral paradigm from developmental psychology to characterize the counting ability of a model that generates images from text. We show that three model scales of the Parti model (350m, 3B, and 20B parameters respectively) each have some counting ability, with a significant jump in performance between the 350m and 3B model scales. We also demonstrate that it is possible to interfere with these models' counting ability simply by incorporating unusual descriptive adjectives for the objects being counted into the text prompt. We analyze our results in the context of the knower-level theory of child number learning. Our results show that we can gain experimental intuition for how to probe model behavior by drawing from a rich literature of behavioral experiments on humans, and, perhaps most importantly, by adapting human developmental benchmarking paradigms to AI models, we can characterize and understand their behavior with respect to our own.

**Authors:**

Sunayana Rane: Princeton University; Alexander Ku: Google DeepMind; Jason Baldridge: Google; Ian Tenney: Google Research; Tom Griffiths: Princeton University ; Been Kim: Google

Can Generative Multimodal Models Count to Ten?

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have arguably enhanced human performance instead of supplanting it. Here we analyse 2.8 million decisions by elite chess players, a field emblematic of AI's application due to its complexity and objective measurability. We identify two AI milestones that correspond with substantial enhancements in top chess players' performance quality over the past four decades: the introduction of personal computers (PCs) and internet access in the late 1990s, and the advent of deep neural networks for chess in the late 2010s. The impact of these technologies, however, varied by age group; adult elite players derived considerable benefits from neural network-based chess computers, whereas younger top players were more influenced by the widespread availability of knowledge and PCs. Our findings underscore AI's potential to amplify human proficiency in complex tasks, highlighting the importance of tailored technological integration among elite performers.0

Advancing the (Elite) Grandmasters: AI's Role in Enhancing Chess Expertise

This study investigates how people assign blame to autonomous vehicles (AVs) when involved in an accident. Our experiment (N = 2647) revealed that people placed more blame on AVs than on human drivers when accident details were unspecified. To examine whether people assess major classes of blame-relevant information differently for AVs and humans, we developed a causal model and introduced a novel concept of prevention effort, which emerged as a crucial factor for blame judgement alongside intentionality. Finally, we addressed the “many hands” problem by exploring how people assign blame to entities associated with AVs and human drivers, such as the car company or an accident victim. Our findings showed that people assigned high blame to these entities in scenarios involving AVs, but not with human drivers. This necessitates adapting a model of blame for AVs to include other agents and thus allow for blame allocation “outside” of autonomous vehicles.0

Are autonomous vehicles blamed differently?

Children learn powerful internal models of the world around them from a few years of egocentric visual experience. Can such internal models be learned from a child's visual experience with highly generic learning algorithms or do they require strong inductive biases? Recent advances in collecting large-scale, longitudinal, developmentally realistic video datasets and generic self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms are allowing us to begin to tackle this nature vs. nurture question. However, existing work typically focuses on image-based SSL algorithms and visual capabilities that can be learned from static images (e.g. object recognition), thus ignoring temporal aspects of the world. To close this gap, here we train self-supervised video models on longitudinal, egocentric headcam recordings collected from a child over a two year period in their early development (6-31 months). The resulting models are highly effective at facilitating the learning of action concepts from a small number of labeled examples; they have favorable data size scaling properties; and they display emergent video interpolation capabilities. Video models also learn more robust object representations than image-based models trained with the exact same data. These results suggest that important temporal aspects of a child's internal model of the world may be learnable from their visual experience using highly generic learning algorithms and without strong inductive biases.0

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Cognitive diversity in context: US-China differences in children’s reasoning, visual attention, and social cognition

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