Cognitive Science

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

Learning by thinking in natural and artificial minds

Canonical cases of learning involve novel observations external to the mind, but learning can also occur through mental processes such as explaining to oneself, mental simulation, analogical comparison, and reasoning. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) reveal that such learning is not restricted to human minds: artificial minds can also self-correct and arrive at new […]

Published on September 19, 2024

Allow Me to Explain: Benefits of Explaining Extend to Distal Academic Performance

Abstract How does the act of explaining influence learning? Prior work has studied effects of explaining through a predominantly proximal lens, measuring short-term outcomes or manipulations within lab settings. Here, we ask whether the benefits of explaining extend to academic performance over time. Specifically, does the quality and frequency of student explanations predict students’ later […]

Published on September 16, 2024

Incremental Discourse‐Update Constrains Number Agreement Attraction Effect

Abstract While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive relative clauses (RRCs) […]

Published on September 16, 2024