CogSci 2025 -

Faculty and students presented papers at the following papers at the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2025), held in San Francisco from 30 July 30 to 2 August:

Agarwala Jatin; M S S Sriharsha; Vuoskoski Jonna, University of Oslo, Norway and Alluri, Vinoo presented a paper on A Empathy and Music Preferences: Exploring Valence-Arousal Patterns, and Sequential Listening Behaviors.

Here is the summary of the paper as explained by the authors Agarwala Jatin; M S S Sriharsha; Vuoskoski Jonna, University of Oslo, Norway and Alluri, Vinoo:

Empathy has been linked to music preferences in controlled laboratory settings, but naturalistic settings like music streaming platforms remain unexplored. This study investigates how trait empathy influences music preferences and sequential listening behaviors in real-world settings. To this end, we collected and analyzed one-year Spotify listening histories of 290 Indian university students alongside their trait empathy scores, measured using the IRI scale. Our results reveal that individuals who score high on the IRI subscales of Empathic Concern, Fantasy, and Perspective Taking prefer sad music. Moreover, those scoring high on Empathic Concern or Perspective Taking were found to be more likely to transition from happy to sad music. These findings partially align with previous lab-based research, specifically for the subscales of Empathic Concern and Fantasy, while providing novel insights into the relations between the Perspective Taking subscale and music consumption. The study also provides novel insights into sequential listening behaviours, thus, strengthening the evidence that empathy shapes musical preferences and listening behaviors across diverse contexts.

Atharva Joshi, a dual degree (CSD) student working with Dr. Vishnu Sreekumar presented a paper virtually on Behavioral signatures of temporal context retrieval during continuous recognition. Here is the summary of the paper as explained by the authors — Atharva Joshi, Kamalakar Dadi, and Vishnu Sreekumar:

An influential mathematical model of human memory, the Temporal Context Model (TCM), proposes that we encode events together with their associations to a slowly evolving “temporal context” (Howard & Kahana, 2002). This temporal context is conceptualized as a recency-weighted average of past experiences, gradually shifting over time. Crucially, the model predicts that when a particular event is later retrieved, the associated temporal context (which has signatures of nearby events) is also automatically reinstated.

Most existing evidence for this process comes from free-recall studies where subjects are given words to study and are later asked to recall them in any order that they like. However, such free recall paradigms introduce critical confounds (Folkerts et al., 2018) and often encourage memory strategies that can mimic temporal context effects (Hintzman, 2011). For example, people might intentionally weave a story to connect consecutively presented (but semantically unrelated) words so that they can remember them better. However, such strategies can yield memory patterns that look like temporal context retrieval.

To overcome these limitations, we investigate temporal context using an image recognition task where the order of memory retrieval is completely random and controlled by the experimenter. In this better-controlled memory task, we found evidence for an obligatory/automated retrieval of temporal context, as predicted by Howard and Kahana (2002), even when the memory task does not encourage strategies that can look like temporal context.

Other lab members (www.mandalab.org) are currently investigating the neural underpinnings of such obligatory temporal context encoding and retrieval mechanisms during recognition memory using fMRI data.

Reference

Joshi, A., Dadi, K., & Sreekumar, V. (2025). Behavioral signatures of temporal context retrieval during continuous recognition. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21q2s8n1

Conference page: https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-2025/

August 2025