Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The predominance of English and English-speaking research over the topics and findings in cognitive science is increasingly recognized as adversely affecting the field. One of the blind spots owing to this bias is a sweeping disinterest in the fungi world: A simple search of keywords in APA PsycInfo (on Jan 24, 2023) combining cognit* with each of the three major kingdoms of life returned the following number of hits: 44,257 for animals, 1,888 for plants, and 111 for fungi. And yet, fungi are the reason why we are here today, why we thrive, and why some of us lose ourselves in a different world altogether comes fall. Fungi have been critical for life on earth, for cultural achievements from baking and brewing to antibiotics, and as a source of food throughout human history. At the same time, they pose unique challenges to key cognitive processes involved in categorization as when distinguishing highly similar and variable species, in predictive processing during foraging, in causal reasoning and risk appraisal for diagnosing whether a species is poisonous, or in the acquisition and storing of information by way of learning, memorization, and teaching ...