Notes from CogSci 2026
Two caveats before you dive in. First, these notes cover only a small slice of the conference: what you see here is just the parts that were most interesting for me. Second, 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.
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 models
Robert D. Hawkins — reference games, politeness, and a negotiation task that exposes grounding failures
Why cognitive-science-inspired benchmarks keep failing us
Tomer 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 development
Julia Hermida — deficit vs. adaptation, the maternal-migration reversal, rural vs. urban Argentina
A resource-rational model of memory-guided deliberation
Marcelo Mattar — eye tracking, "looking at nothing," and a meta-RL model of memory sampling
Poster follow-up: the memory-sampling model, in more depth
Jonathan Nicholas — the same project, a more technical Q&A
What working memory limits mean for planning
Fred Calloway — decision trees, forgetting, and whether representation is just attention
Prize Lectures
Glushko Prize lecture: rethinking scientific discovery
Marina Dubova — simulated scientist communities, and "excess capacity learning"
Rumelhart Prize lecture
Douglas Medin — a tribute to Rumelhart, then diversity-based reasoning and psychological distance from nature
Lila Gleitman Prize lecture: cognitive tools
Judy Fan — number lines, sketches, data visualization, and building things together
Symposium
Large language models and personal memory
Paul Smart — encoding, elaboration, retrieval, joint reminiscing, and hallucination as a possible virtue