Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What are the major topics of the Cognitive Science Societyconference? How have they changed over the years? To an-swer these questions, we applied an unsupervised learning al-gorithm known as dynamic topic modeling (Blei & Lafferty,2006) to the 2000–2017 Proceedings of the Cognitive Sci-ence Society. Unlike traditional topic models, a dynamic topicmodel is sensitive to the temporal context of documents andcan characterize the evolution of each topic across years. Us-ing this model, we identify historical trends in the popularity oftopics over time, and shifts in word use within topics indicativeof changing focuses within the field. We also measure the cor-relation across topics, and use the model to highlight the topicstructure of particular papers and labs. We believe dynamictopic models present an important tool towards understandingCognitive Science as it continues to grow and evolve over time