Netherlands

Emotions, including stress and anxiety, strongly influence cognition and learning experiences. This study investigates the impacts of stress on cognitive load during learning, considering baseline anxiety levels and fluctuating stress. With a focus on technology-based learning, a web-based HTML introduction module was used. Using a social stress test, 15 participants underwent a stressful situation during learning, while the control group of 15 were in a neutral condition. Results indicate significantly elevated stress levels in the experimental group throughout the experiment, with a corresponding decrease in learning performance. For high perceived difficulty, the stressed condition demonstrated a significant increase in response time compared to the control condition. In contrast, when experiencing low perceived difficulty, a significant difference in response time across conditions was not found. Findings emphasise the importance of managing stress in educational contexts to optimise learning outcomes in the evolving landscape of technology-based learning.0

CogSci 2024

The Effects of Stress and Anxiety in Technology-Based Learning Environments

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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#### About

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.

#### Our History 

* **Society Creation**<br>
The Society was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts in 1979. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. 
<br><br>
* **Conference Creation**<br>
The first conference on cognitive science was held at La Jolla, California in August, 1979, and has occurred annually since then. The proceedings of each conference are published, and those from most years are available through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The annual proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference represent a major source of information on new work and new ideas in the scientific study of thinking. In 1990, the Society, with help from an anonymous donor, established the David Marr Prize for the best student paper at each annual meeting.
<br><br>
* **Journal Creation**<br>
The Journal, Cognitive Science, began publication in 1976, and is now published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Executive Editor is currently Richard P. Cooper of Birkbeck, University of London, and there are 18 Associate Editors and a 30-member editorial board. It serves as the premier outlet for research reports that intersect two or more disciplines. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society. The Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society voted in late 2006 to found a new journal, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). The Editor in Chief is Wayne Gray, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The journal seeks to fill a niche not occupied by Cognitive Science Journal or other cognitive science journals. Membership in the Society includes a subscription to Cognitive Science and TopiCS. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society.
<br><br>

#### Code of Conduct

By attending the CogSci 2025 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s **[Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ChPuihLy6jE_BWqfO7J2KKgX35JW2zsM/view?usp=sharing)**.
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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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.

**ON-DEMAND PROGRAM ACCESS AFTER THE CONFERENCE**<br>
Recordings of the invited program are now available. You can access them by clicking on the 'Schedule' icon on the left. Select view by week and navigate to the day and time slot of the recording you wish to view. Click on the time slot to access the recording.

Recordings available (click on each recording to view):

**Thursday, July 25**<br>
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)<br>
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)<br>
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
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)<br>

**Friday, July 26**<br>
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)<br>
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration)<br>
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
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)<br>

**Saturday, July 27**<br>
0900: [Keynote Speaker Gregor Schöner on How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18083/lecture/99273-dynamics-within-the-mind)<br>
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture)<br>
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture)<br>


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
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**The Program Book can be downloaded [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yRVp1cBqRnAbdYi4GXWV_pZeyWNsRquv/view?usp=sharing).**

#### **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**<br>
By attending the CogSci 2024 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s [Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-6KkptF0Gn3ZYGJDlpqpwTdImw45Ng0/view?usp=drive_link).

**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY**<br>
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.
<br><br>

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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.

Since their inception, drift diffusion models have been applied across a wide range of disciplines within psychology to uncover the mental processes that underlie perception, attention, and cognitive control. Our studies contribute to ongoing efforts to extend these models to abstract, social reasoning processes like moral or legal judgment. We presented participants with a set of social rules, while manipulating whether various
behaviors violated the rule’s letter and/or its purpose–––two independent standards by which to decide what constitutes a transgression. In this framework, cases that violate or comply with both a rule’s text and its purpose can be seen as congruent or ‘easy’ cases, and cases that elicit opposing verdicts as incongruent or ‘hard’ cases–––in a manner analogous to widely-studied conflict tasks in cognitive psychology. We recorded 34,573 decisions made by 364 participants under soft time pressure, and investigated whether hierarchical drift diffusion modeling could explain various behavioral patterns in our data. This approach yielded three key insights: (1) judgments of conviction were faster than judgments of acquittal owing to an overall bias (z parameter) toward conviction; (2) incongruent cases produced longer reaction times than congruent cases (an interference effect), due to differences in the rate of evidence accumulation (v parameter) across case-types; and (3) increases in the ratio of congruent-to-incongruent cases amplified the interference effect on reaction times, by fostering greater response caution—revealed by a larger threshold (or a parameter). Thus, our studies document dissociable effects of the drift diffusion components on rule-based decision-making, and illustrate how the cognitive processes that subserve abstract and social decision-making tasks, such as the enforcement of communal and legal rules, may be illuminated through the drift diffusion framework.0

Understanding rule enforcement using drift diffusion models

The present research evaluates a coherence-based network approach to moral judgement. Under this view, judgement is an outcome of achieving coherence between a network of causally interacting beliefs. Consistent with this, despite similar initial views, participants re-evaluated their beliefs and attitudes in support of their judgement, driving polarisation between individuals reporting competing judgements. Different properties of the dynamic network structure determined metacognitive properties of judgement such as confidence and perceived task difficulty. Whilst the judgement formation process involves revising beliefs and values to achieve a coherent arrangement, the nature of the judgement reached depends on the aggregate weight of these beliefs once the revision process is completed.0

A coherence-based approach to moral trade-offs

In this paper, we explored the attribution of causal responsibility in a causal chain of events, where an agent A instructs an intermediate agent B to execute some harmful action which leads to a bad outcome. In Study 1, participants judged B to be more causally responsible, more blameworthy, and more deserving of punishment than A. In Study 2, we explored the effect of proximity on judgments of the two agents by adding a third, subsequent contributing cause, such that B’s action no longer directly caused the final outcome. Participants judged both agents A and B to be less causally responsible and deserving of punishment (but not less blameworthy) when they were less proximal to the outcome, and there were no differences in judgments between the two agents. In Study 3, we varied whether each of the two agents (A and B) intended for the final outcome to occur. We find an interaction between role and intent, where participants only mitigated judgments for A when A did not intend for the outcome to occur – regardless of B’s intent. We discuss possible explanations for our findings and its implications for moral and legal decision-making.0

Attribution of Responsibility Between Agents in a Causal Chain of Events

Decisions about extinction risks are ubiquitous in everyday life and for our continued existence as a species. We introduce a new risky-choice task that can be used to study this topic: The Extinction Gambling Task. Here, we investigate two versions of this task: a Keep variant, where participants cannot accumulate any more earnings after the extinction event, and a Lose variant, where extinction also wipes out all previous earnings. We derive optimal solutions for both variants and compare them to behavioural data. Our findings suggest that people understand the difference between the two variants and their behaviour is qualitatively in line with the optimal solution. Further, we find evidence for risk-aversion in the Keep condition but not in the Lose condition. We hope that this task can facilitate further research on this vital topic.0

Introducing the Extinction Gambling Task

To date, no account of lie-truth judgement formation has been capable of explaining how core cognitive mechanisms such as memory encoding and retrieval are employed to reach a judgement of either truth or lie. One account, the Adaptive Lie Detector theory (ALIED: Street, Bischof, Vadillo, & Kingstone, 2016) is sufficiently well defined that its assumptions may be implemented in a computational model. In this paper we describe our attempt to ground ALIED in the representations and mechanisms of the ACT-R cognitive architecture and then test the model by comparing it to human data from an experiment conducted by Street et al. (2016). The model provides a close fit to the human data and a plausible mechanistic account of how specific and general information are integrated in the formation of truth-lie judgements.0

Combining individuating and context-general cues in lie detection

Human learning does not stop at solving a single problem. Instead, we seek new challenges, define new goals, and come up with new ideas. What drives people to disrupt the existing conceptual landscape and create new things? Here, we examine the decision to create new things under different levels of expected returns. We formalize innovation as stochastically recombining existing ideas, where successful and more complex combinations generate higher returns. This formalization allows us to cast innovation-seeking as a Markov decision process, and derive optimal policies under different settings. Data collected through an online behavioral experiment confirm our prediction that people should invest more time and effort in seeking innovations when they know the chances of success are high and the potential new ideas would be rewarding. However, people also deviate from being optimal, both innovating more and less than they should in different settings.0

A Rational Model of Innovation by Recombination

Helping is a universal human behavior, and is a core aspect of a functioning society. However, the decision to provide help, and what type of help to provide, is a complex cognitive calculation that weights many costs and benefits simultaneously.  In this paper, we explore how various costs influence the moment-to-moment decision to help in a simple video game. Participants were paired with another human participant and were asked to make repeated decisions that could benefit either themselves or their partner.  
Several preregistered manipulations altered the cost each person paid for actions in the environment, the intrinsic resource capacity of individuals to perform the task, the visibility of the other player's score, and the affordances within the environment for helping.  The results give novel insight into the cost-benefit analyses that people apply when providing help, and highlight the role of reciprocity in influencing helping decisions.0

Moment-to-moment decisions of when and how to help another person

When do children understand that number words (such as ‘five’) refer to exact quantities and that the same number word can be used to label two sets whose items correspond 1-to-1 (e.g., if each bunny has a hat, and there are five hats, then there are five bunnies)? Two studies with English-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds revealed that children who could accurately count large sets (CP knowers) were able to infer that sets exhibiting 1-to-1 correspondence share the same number word, but not children who could not accurately count large sets (subset knowers). However, not all CP knowers made this inference, suggesting that learning to construct and label large sets is a critical but insufficient step in discovering that numbers represent exact quantities. CP knowers also failed to identify 1-to-1 corresponding sets when faced with sets that had an off-by-one difference, suggesting that children who could accurately count large sets used approximate magnitude to establish set equality, rather than 1-to-1 correspondence. These results suggest that children’s initial intuitions about numerical and set equality are based on approximation, not 1-to-1 correspondence, and that this occurs well after they have learned to count and construct large sets.0

‘Five’ is the number of bunnies and hats: Children’s understanding of cardinal extension and exact number

People’s mental states constantly change as they navigate and interact with their environment. Accordingly, social reasoning requires us not only to represent mental states but also to understand the ways in which mental states tend to change. Despite their importance, relatively little is known about children’s understanding of the dynamics of mental states. To explore this question, we studied a common type of mental state change: knowledge gain. Specifically, we studied whether five- and six-year-olds distinguish between agents who gain knowledge and those who lose knowledge. In one condition, children saw an agent answer a two-alternative choice question incorrectly, followed by an identical-looking agent who answered the same question correctly (i.e., gaining knowledge). In another condition, children saw the reverse pattern (i.e., losing knowledge). Children were more likely to infer they had seen two different agents in the knowledge loss condition relative to the knowledge gain condition. These results suggest that children have intuitions about how epistemic states change and open new questions about children’s naive theories of mental state dynamics.0

Children’s Expectations About Epistemic Change

When children use online apps, they often share personal information, such as their name, address, and birthday. In the present study, we investigated the mental models children use to reason about what apps are allowed to do with personal data after it has been willingly shared with an app. 57 children ages 8- to 11-years-old were read a story in which they were asked to judge whether an online game (app) was allowed or not allowed to perform four different actions: looking, saving, selling, and showing. We compared these judgments to a comparison condition where we asked children what users themselves should be allowed to do with their data. We found that children viewed the app as less permitted to act on the data than users as well as some further differences by action-type. Our findings suggest that children use something akin to a “lending” model to conceptualize data transfers, in which apps have less rights than users despite the data being willingly transferred to the app. Our findings also suggest that children differentiate among the uses of information as children think certain actions by the app are less permissible than others (e.g., looking is more permissible than selling).0

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