Cognitive Science

The latest breakthroughs, innovations, and cool happenings at the cutting edge of the world of cognitive science. Updated daily.

Social odor as a source of learning in human infants

Maternal odor has recently emerged as an important but ill-understood factor in sociocognitive learning in early human development. We propose that social odor plays its unique role in the first year of life through dissociable affective and perceptual mechanisms. These mechanisms yield distinct predictions for future studies of social odor. Read Full Article (External Site) […]

Published on May 16, 2025

Synchrony and subjective experience: the neural correlates of the stream of consciousness

Human subjectivity, our first-person conscious experience of the world, is among the deepest scientific mysteries. This opinion article lays out an approach to examining the neural correlates of subjectivity as it unfolds over time. Subjective experience is inherently idiosyncratic, arising from effortless interpretations that feel like perceived facts (p-interpretations), and integrative, with past and expected […]

Published on May 16, 2025

Mark the Unexpected! Animacy Preference and Directed Movement in Visual Language

Abstract A preference for animate entities over inanimate entities is commonly found in perception and language. In our corpus study based on a cross-cultural set of 331 comics from 81 countries, we asked whether animacy preference plays a role in the morphological marking of motion in the visual language(s) used in comics. We were interested […]

Published on May 13, 2025