Cognitive Science

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

Relevance and the Role of Labels in Categorization

Abstract Language has been shown to influence the ability to form categories. Nevertheless, in most prior work, the effects of language could have been bolstered by the fact that linguistic labels were introduced by the experimenter prior to the categorization task in ways that could have highlighted their relevance for the task. Here, we compared […]

Published on December 26, 2023

Consistency and Variation in Reasoning About Physical Assembly

Abstract The ability to reason about how things were made is a pervasive aspect of how humans make sense of physical objects. Such reasoning is useful for a range of everyday tasks, from assembling a piece of furniture to making a sandwich and knitting a sweater. What enables people to reason in this way even […]

Published on December 25, 2023

The Efficiency of Question‐Asking Strategies in a Real‐World Visual Search Task

Abstract In recent years, a multitude of datasets of human–human conversations has been released for the main purpose of training conversational agents based on data-hungry artificial neural networks. In this paper, we argue that datasets of this sort represent a useful and underexplored source to validate, complement, and enhance cognitive studies on human behavior and […]

Published on December 24, 2023