CogSci 2026 — Talk Notes

Notes from talks, prize lectures, and one workshop panel. Click through to any of them below.

A caveat on all of these: I took these notes live (or wrote them up shortly after from memory), so there's a decent chance I misheard a name, or got a number slightly off somewhere. Treat the gist as reliable and the fine details, especially exact attributions in the discussions, with a bit of skepticism.

Workshop

Closing panel: does anything actually solve the frame problem?Framing the Problem workshop — normative vs. process models, and whether LLMs count

Talks

Interactive, multi-turn evaluation of language modelsRobert D. Hawkins — reference games, politeness, and a negotiation task that exposes grounding failures
Why cognitive-science-inspired benchmarks keep failing usTomer Ullman — the Ali and Kogi story, the chocolate-bag task, illusions and cartoons
Do multilingual models and brains share a format?Andrea Gregor de Varda — shared units across languages, and a 21-language brain-alignment study
Poverty, income instability, and child cognitive developmentJulia Hermida — deficit vs. adaptation, the maternal-migration reversal, rural vs. urban Argentina
Sacred and secular values in how we see natureSonya Sachdeva — the Ganges studies, Jamaica Bay, fire suppression, and 400,000 public comments
A resource-rational model of memory-guided deliberationMarcelo Mattar — eye tracking, "looking at nothing," and a meta-RL model of memory sampling
Poster follow-up: the memory-sampling model, in more depthJonathan Nicholas — the same project, a more technical Q&A
What working memory limits mean for planningFred Calloway — decision trees, forgetting, and whether representation is just attention

Prize lectures

Glushko Prize lecture: rethinking scientific discoveryMarina Dubova — simulated scientist communities, and "excess capacity learning"
Rumelhart Prize lectureDouglas Medin — a tribute to Rumelhart, then diversity-based reasoning and psychological distance from nature
Lila Gleitman Prize lecture: cognitive toolsJudy Fan — number lines, sketches, data visualization, and building things together

Symposium

Large language models and personal memoryPaul Smart — encoding, elaboration, retrieval, joint reminiscing, and hallucination as a possible virtue