Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Abstraction enables humans to distill a cascade of sensory experiences into a useful format for making sense of the world and generalizing to new contexts. In developing theories of how these various forms of abstraction are discovered and used, cognitive scientists have proposed a multitude of representational formats with different properties to capture behavioral data and neural activity. However, because abstraction manifests in human cognition and behavior in so many ways, individual communities within cognitive science have generally studied these specific forms of abstraction under domain-specific representational assumptions. The goal of this workshop is to facilitate the search for unifying principles governing how humans learn, discover, and use abstractions in different domains, by providing a venue for the exchange of theoretical and empirical insights between research communities.