Cognitive Science

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

Cellular psychology: relating cognition to context-sensitive pyramidal cells

‘Cellular psychology’ is a new field of inquiry that studies dendritic mechanisms for adapting mental events to the current context, thus increasing their coherence, flexibility, effectiveness, and comprehensibility. Apical dendrites of neocortical pyramidal cells have a crucial role in cognition – those dendrites receive input from diverse sources, including feedback, and can amplify the cell’s […]

Published on October 2, 2024

When visual metacognition fails: widespread anosognosia for visual deficits

Anosognosia for visual deficits – cases where significant visual deficits go unnoticed – challenges the view that our own conscious experiences are what we know best. We review these widespread and striking failures of awareness. Anosognosia can occur with total blindness, visual abnormalities induced by brain lesions, and eye diseases. We show that anosognosia for […]

Published on October 1, 2024

Demystifying unsupervised learning: how it helps and hurts

Humans and machines rarely have access to explicit external feedback or supervision, yet manage to learn. Most modern machine learning systems succeed because they benefit from unsupervised data. Humans are also expected to benefit and yet, mysteriously, empirical results are mixed. Does unsupervised learning help humans or not? Here, we argue that the mixed results […]

Published on October 1, 2024