CogSci 2025 Submissions

The Cognitive Science Society invites members and non-members to submit their work for individual oral and poster presentations, as well as contributed symposia for the upcoming CogSci 2025 Conference, taking place from July 30 – August 2, 2025 in San Francisco, CA.

CogSci 2025 will be fully hybrid with streaming of the entire program, except for workshops (which will all be in-person). Presenters can choose to present in-person in San Francisco or virtually, and virtual attendees will be able to view the entire program synchronously. Virtual talks will be presented synchronously throughout the program, and virtual posters will be available for asynchronous interaction via the conference app, as well as synchronous online interaction via video conferencing.

You will need to indicate your planned mode of attendance at submission. If your submission is accepted, you will need to finalize your presentation format when you turn in your camera-ready paper. Note that it will not be possible to switch an in-person talk to a remotely-presented talk after your camera-ready submission, since in order to manage costs we will not have the appropriate administrative or technical support for widespread remote presentation.

Review the submission guidelines, download the required templates, and make note of key deadline dates on the website.

Interested in becoming a reviewer?

General Information

There are three categories of main conference submissions:

  1. Research papers (presented as talks or posters)
  2. Contributed symposia
  3. Member abstracts

An online proceedings will be published by the Cognitive Science Society. At the time of final submission authors will be required to agree to release of their proceedings contribution under a CC-BY license. This means that authors allow free reuse of their work provided the original authors are attributed.  This is the standard license for many open access journals. If your paper submission is accepted for presentation as a talk or as a poster, you will have the option of publishing just the abstract in the conference proceedings, rather than the full paper. Submitted papers must be no more than 6 pages, plus an unlimited number of pages for references. Authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to revise their submissions after the notification of decisions is sent (prior to the ‘final form’ proceedings-ready submissions deadline) and will be allowed unlimited space for references and acknowledgments (i.e., final submissions is 6 pages plus an unlimited amount of pages for references and acknowledgments). The proceedings volume is not considered archival (more information) for the purposes of eventual journal submission, but this abstract-only option was introduced to address concerns that some authors have expressed about publishing the same, or similar, paper in a journal after it has already appeared in the CogSci Proceedings.

To present a talk, you must submit a full research paper for review. If a submission is accepted, at least one author must both pre-register and attend the conference in order to have the submission appear in the program and conference proceedings.

Key Dates:

*All deadline times are UTC-11 by midnight. If a submission is made when it is still the deadline date at any location in the world, the submission will be considered for inclusion in the program.

Call for Submissions Open: December 2, 2024
Submissions Close: February 1, 2025

Meta-reviewers to Invite All Reviewers: February 3-10, 2025
Reviews Due: March 2, 2025
Meta-reviews Due: March 15, 2025

Notifications of Decision Sent: April 5, 2025
Accepted Submissions Due in Final Form: May 10, 2025

FAQ

Please click on the button below to review the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ resource page

Submission Guidelines

General submission procedures:

Evaluation Criteria

The submission categories differ in presentation format and evaluation criteria, as described below:

  • Initial paper submissions and member abstracts should follow the double-blind reviewing policy, or they will be rejected directly
  • Deviating from the submission templates, including reducing margins, spacing, font size and/or exceeding the 6-page limit for the initial submission will result in a desk rejection of your submission
  • All submissions must be uploaded via the PCS submission portal
  • IMPORTANT: All authors, primary and secondary, must have an account with current information in the PCS submission portal.  It is recommended this be collected before the deadline to ensure no issues upon submission.
Up-to-date author information

IMPORTANT: All authors, primary and secondary, must have a single, up-to-date account with current address and email information in the PCS submission portal.  Submitting authors should ensure that each co-author has such an account at least two weeks before the final submission deadline to safeguard a complete and accurate submission. Adding additional or erroneous author accounts causes major problems, including misattribution of authorship, and could be grounds for a desk rejection of submissions with incomplete or erroneous author lists.

Please ensure that all author information is entered into the system in Title Case (Upper case first letter of each name) and not all in upper or lowercase.

Up-to-date author information for every co-author should be collected by submitting authors well in advance of the deadline. The creation of last minute duplicate accounts causes major issues upon submission, including misattribution of authorship, and could be grounds for a desk rejection of incomplete or erroneous author lists

Double blind review procedures
  • All submissions must be anonymized.  No information that would reveal author identity, including author names or affiliations, should be included.  References to one’s own work should not be identifiable as self-citations; e.g. “As we showed in Jones (2017)” should be avoided in favor of “Jones (2017) showed.”  Acknowledgements, including sources of funding and assistance, should also be omitted in the initial submissions. Any online supplemental information that submissions refer to must also be anonymized. Submissions that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected.
  • To facilitate blind reviews, the naming convention for your submissions has been revised.  Please name your pdf file as follows:

<first2wordsinthetitle_submissiondate.pdf>. By “first2wordsinthetitle”, for a title like “deep boltzman machine”, submitted on Oct 28, the filename should then be “deepboltzman_1028.pdf

Submission Formats

Paper Submissions

2025 Hybrid format: CogSci 2025 will be fully hybrid with streaming of the entire program, except for workshops (which will all be in-person). Presenters can choose to present in-person in San Francisco or virtually, and virtual attendees will be able to view the entire program synchronously. Virtual talks will be presented synchronously throughout the program, and virtual posters will be available for asynchronous interaction via the conference app.

You will need to indicate your planned mode of attendance at submission. If your submission is accepted, you will need to finalize your presentation format when you turn in your camera-ready paper. Note that it will not be possible to switch an in-person talk to a remotely-presented talk after your camera-ready submission, since in order to manage costs we will not have the appropriate administrative or technical support for widespread remote presentation.

Submitted research papers may be no more than six pages long, with an unlimited number of pages for references,  and must use the two-column format described in the “Submission Formats” section below. Reviews of paper submissions will be double-blind; thus the submissions must be anonymized: no information identifying the authors should be included in the submissions. After the Notification of Decisions, authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to revise their submissions prior to the Final Form (camera ready) submissions deadline.  To facilitate revisions, authors will be allowed to update their six page paper and add an unlimited amount of pages for acknowledgements and references. 

All paper submissions will be evaluated by peer reviewers who make recommendations to the Program Committee. The final decision of acceptance is made by the Program Co-Chairs.

Student authors are welcome at CogSci 2025. Students who are the first authors of accepted research papers qualify to apply for travel grants awarded by the Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation. In addition, undergraduate students who are presenting authors are eligible for the Sayan Gul award. Requests for student travel grants must be made at the time of paper submission. See the Conference Awards page for more information.

Several other honors will be awarded to select research papers with students identified as the first author. These honors include the Marr Prize for the best student paper and four awards for research involving computational modeling methods. The awards decisions are made by an awards committee, whose members are appointed by the conference Program Committee.

Each room for talk presentations will have a video projector with standard HDMI input. All speakers must bring their own laptops; Mac/Apple users must also bring an appropriate Apple adapter.

Preprint Policy:

For 6-page papers submitted to the 2025 conference, you are welcome to make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (e.g., via preprint servers such as ArXiv or the Open Science Framework) at any time.  Posting preprints facilitates the open, transparent exchange of scientific ideas and can speed the advancement of knowledge.  However, in order to preserve double-blind peer review as much as possible, we ask that you refrain from broadly advertising any non-anonymized version of your paper via social media or other means (e.g., emails to large recipient lists announcing your paper) between the dates of February 1 (conference submission deadline) and April 12 (decision notifications).


 
Contributed Symposia

A contributed symposium is allotted 90 minutes, sufficient for four 20-minute talks including questions, followed by a discussion. Proposals should list the speakers and the moderator, describe their qualifications, and explain the importance of the topic. Inclusion of more than 4 talks needs to be strongly justified.

A symposium proposal is submitted as a two-page summary to be included in the Proceedings if accepted (see Submission Formats below). The best symposia present differing perspectives drawn from a wide range of disciplines on a common topic. Proposals including speakers from similar backgrounds or theoretical perspectives are not usually accepted. Contributed symposia are competitive and peer-reviewed to aid in determining acceptance. Contributed symposia should not be conflated with invited symposia arranged by the conference organizers.


 
Member Abstracts

Members of the Cognitive Science Society may submit a 150-word abstract. Each member can be the first author on only one member abstract (a member can be a co-author on more than one abstract). The Program Committee reviews the member abstracts for relevance. Accepted abstracts will be included in the Proceedings, and presented at the conference as posters.
For 2025: All member abstracts are assessed for quality and fit with cognitive science. In recent years, the number of member abstract submissions has exceeded the allowable space for in-person poster presentations. Should more abstracts be accepted than space permits, a random process will be used to identify which abstracts will be accepted. Further, we cannot guarantee that there will be space for authors of rejected full papers to resubmit that work as a member abstract.


 
Pre-conference Workshops & Tutorials

For 2025: Researchers are encouraged to submit proposals for the tutorials and workshops to be offered on the day immediately preceding the main conference. Workshops and tutorials are presented in-person only to in-person attendees; there is no remote presentation or attendance option. Additionally, due to scheduling constraints this year, we will only be able to accommodate half day (AM) workshops and tutorials. Proposals for tutorials and workshops must be submitted via the PCS submission portal by the submission deadline. Both tutorial and workshop proposals are competitive, with only a limited number of proposals accepted for the program.

Tutorials allow participants to gain new insights, knowledge, and skills from a broad range of research in cognitive science. Tutorials must cover a well-established topic or method, and be delivered by one or more experts in that area. Tutorials should be presented at a level that will make the material accessible to a postgraduate student with a doctoral degree in any discipline of cognitive science. We strongly encourage an interactive delivery format. Tutorials may either be a half-day or full-day in duration. Half-day tutorials are about 3 hours long (not including breaks). Full-day tutorials are about 6 hours long (not including breaks). Proposals should be submitted as two-page summaries that describe the significance of the topic or method, describe the structure and activities to be included in the tutorial, describe the credentials of the tutorial organizer, and include relevant references. (See “Submission Formats,” below.) Comments and evaluations from peer reviewers will be solicited to aid in acceptance decisions. Organizers of accepted tutorials will be reimbursed for expenses associated with organizing the tutorial, up to a fixed limit (US $600 for each half-day tutorial and US $1200 for each full-day tutorial that is delivered). To request reimbursement, organizers must submit a budget with their proposal. No funds are available for travel, hotel, per diems, food/drink (for the session or the organizers), or printed materials. Budgets may include registration costs for individuals who would not otherwise attend due to demonstrated hardship. These funds are based on entry fees charged to workshop participants (US $30 on top of the regular conference registration). Tutorial organizers will be given access to the email addresses of the preregistered participants so they can contact them in advance about needed equipment or supplies, as well as to let them know of any preparations prior to the tutorial.

Workshops provide opportunities for in-depth discussions on topics of importance in Cognitive Science. Workshops may concentrate on emerging research areas, cross-disciplinary topics, application issues, and research methods. Workshop organizers are responsible for selecting and inviting speakers, and assembling input from each presenter. Workshops may either be a half-day or a full-day in duration. Half-day workshops are about 3 hours long (not including breaks). Full-day workshops are about 6 hours long (not including breaks). Workshop proposals should be submitted as two-page summaries that describe the significance of the topic, each presenter’s planned contribution, and the structure of the workshop. (See “Submission Formats,” for proposal format.) Peer reviewers will be solicited to aid in making acceptance decisions. Organizers of accepted workshops will be reimbursed for expenses associated with organizing the workshop up to a fixed limit (US $600 for each half-day and US $1200 for each full-day workshop delivered). To request reimbursement, organizers must submit a budget with their proposal. No funds are available for travel, hotel, per diems, food/drink (for the session or the organizers), or printed materials. Budgets may include registration costs for individuals who would not otherwise attend due to demonstrated hardship. These funds are based on entry fees charged to workshop participants (US $30 on top of the regular conference registration).

Submission Template Procedures

Submissions that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected

  • It is mandatory that all submitters adhere to the paper submission guidelines by using the templates provided
  • Deviating from the submission templates including reducing margins, spacing, font size and/or exceeding the 6-page limit for the initial submission will result in a desk rejection of your submission.

Template Downloads:

Download template for 6-page paper submissions and for 2-page submissions (symposia, tutorials, and workshops) below:

Submission Template

(Download Word & Latex versions) for 6-page paper submissions
and for 2-page submissions (symposia, tutorials, and workshops).

MEMBER ABSTRACTS

No template is required for member abstracts – all text must be entered (or copied and pasted) directly into the PCS submission portal. Formatted text is not permitted.

The Cognitive Science Society is pleased to announce the establishment of the CogSci Grove which aims to mobilise cognitive scientists to offset carbon emissions associated with their professional activities.