Netherlands

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

CogSci 2024

A Rational Model of Innovation by Recombination

Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
 [**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Cogsci-2022-PAAG-Detailed-July-12final-1.pdf)
 [**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/DeArmond-CogSci2022-program-v113-final.pdf)

This conference requires a registration to attend. Please use the link below to secure your ticket. The website will be available to all registered attendees on July 25th. 

[Register to Attend](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/registration/)

Registration Is Required

CogSci 2022

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





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** 
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** 
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) 
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture) 
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture) 
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** 
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) 
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture) 
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
<div style="position:relative;padding-top:0;width:900px;height:500px;"><iframe style="position:absolute;border:none;width:100%;height:100%;left:0;top:0;" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/cble/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe></div>


**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** 
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** 
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 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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

An Investigation of Children’s Reasoning about Data Transfers

We describe the verbs pursue, chase, and follow as “tracking” verbs because they share conceptual similarities: they are all motion verbs that describe a dynamic spatial relation between two entities, as in “the cat chased the mouse”. What distinguishes them from one another? If, as some cognitive scientists argue, mental simulations underlie the way the mind processes all motion verbs — including those that describe static scenarios, such as run in “the road runs through the desert” — then those simulations may explain the differences between tracking verbs. For instance, chase and pursue may describe conceptually faster motion than follow. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments. The studies presented participants with imagery of one car chasing another along a straight road. In Experiment 1, participants estimated the distance that the pursued car would travel 3 seconds into the future by dragging a slider to an appropriate point on the road. In Experiment 2, participants estimated the distance by selecting from several distance options on a logarithmic scale. Both studies validated the hypothesis that chase and pursue describe faster motion, i.e., participants reliably estimated shorter distances for descriptions that included those verbs. We place the results in the context of broader theories of pursuit perception and verb comprehension.

**Authors:**

Maria Kon: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory; Sangeet Khemlani: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

How spatial simulations distinguish “tracking” verbs

Do metaphors for learning influence how well we remember new information? We tested whether reading a learning-oriented metaphor (i.e., focusing on learning processes and outcomes) versus a self-referential metaphor (i.e., focusing on motivational or emotional aspects of learning) can affect the quality of learning (contrast adapted from Wegner et al., 2020). Participants either read a paragraph likening learning to a long hiking tour (self-referential condition), expanding a library in one’s mind (learning-oriented condition), or no passage (no metaphor condition). Then participants learned a new mnemonic technique, the Method of Loci, and had to apply it to a sentence learning task. The effect of metaphor on sentence memory depended on participants’ education level. People with college degrees learned better in the self-referential condition than the learning-oriented condition, whereas people without college degrees showed the opposite pattern. These findings identify novel individual differences in how learning metaphors causally influence learning outcomes.

**Authors:**

Alexia Toskos Dils: Purchase College, SUNY

Individual Differences in Self-Referential versus Learning-Oriented Metaphors on Learning Outcomes

Attempts to recover and reconstruct the origins of mathematics have traditionally focused on identifying evidence of early notational systems of quantification. We have aim to show in this paper that archaeological material culture can offer an alternate, more tangible source of information about mathematical knowledge in the deep past, especially when it is paired with ethnographic and cross-cultural data. In addition, when linked to the cognitive science of mathematics, it can support inferences about how humans first began to grasp, learn, and apply mathematical ideas. We focus on fibre technologies and weaving crafts as prime examples of activities that contain and afford mathematical knowledge, in response to Lakoff & Núñez’s call to explore the common practices that underlie mathematical ideas and to rethink mathematics as grounded in human experience.

**Authors:**

Larissa Mendoza Straffon: University of Bergen

Weaving the Fabric of Mathematics: Grounding Mathematical Knowledge in Fibre Technologies

Question-asking is a crucial aspect of human interaction. Questions fuel engagement, stimulate thought processes, foster learning, and facilitate information seeking behavior. Yet, scarce empirical research on question-asking, or its relation to related cognitive capacities such as creativity and intelligence, exists. We empirically investigate how people ask questions and the connections between question-asking and creativity through the domain of interactive gaming. To do so, we developed an online game—Spot the Spy—where players are required to find a hidden spy amidst a crowded room, by asking questions that guide them in their investigation. Thus, we dive into the very essence of how creative and strategic thinking collaborate to shape the queries we formulate. We find that players' gameplay correlates with their cognitive abilities, especially with intelligence measures. As such, our game captures insights into the profound ways creative cognition shapes the questions we articulate and navigate within dynamic gaming environments.

**Authors:**

Gal Sasson: Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; Benjamin T Cook: Shenkar College; Vered Pnueli: Shenkar; Yoed Kenett: Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Spot the Spy: Exploring Natural Question-Asking in Gaming Environments

To conceptualise biological and mental processes, often a dynamical systems perspective is suggested. In addition to dynamics, the structure of the contextual makeup or world configuration (of an organism or brain) plays a crucial role too, as well as adaptivity of the processes. This paper provides a conceptual perspective where the structure, dynamics, and adaptivity of these processes are distinguished and related to each other via adaptive dynamical systems. Moreover, it is shown how networks can be used to represent this conceptual perspective. Here an adaptive dynamical system of any order of adaptivity can be covered where any level can model control over the level below. The approach is illustrated by case studies for higher-order adaptive evolutionary processes. One of these case studies shows a fifth-order adaptive dynamical system that models how due to bad environmental influences at a young age, epigenetic effects can lead to a lifelong mental disorder.

**Authors:**

Jan Treur: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

On Structure, Dynamics, and Adaptivity for Biological and Mental Processes: a Higher-Order Adaptive Dynamical System Modeling Perspective

Value alignment is essential for building AI systems that can safely and reliably interact with people. However, what a person values---and is even capable of valuing---depends on the concepts that they are currently using to understand and evaluate what happens in the world. The dependence of values on concepts means that concept alignment is a prerequisite for value alignment---agents need to align their representation of a situation with that of humans in order to successfully align their values. Here, we formally analyze the concept alignment problem in the inverse reinforcement learning setting, show how neglecting concept alignment can lead to systematic value mis-alignment, and describe an approach that helps minimize such failure modes by jointly reasoning about a person's concepts and values. Additionally, we report experimental results with human participants showing that humans reason about the concepts used by an agent when acting intentionally, in line with our joint reasoning model.

**Authors:**

Sunayana Rane: Princeton University; Mark K Ho: Stevens Institute of Technology; Ilia Sucholutsky: Princeton University; Tom Griffiths: Princeton University 

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