Cognitive Science

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

The forgotten body: the emergence of conscious experiences in early life

Looking back at the emergence of consciousness in early life, one may repurpose the distinction between the ‘easy’ and the ‘hard problem’ [1]. The easy problem is when consciousness sets on in early development. By contrast, the hard problem is how conscious experiences get off the ground. Bayne et al. [2] address the easy problem […]

Published on September 6, 2024

Kin Cognition and Communication: What Talking, Gesturing, and Drawing About Family Can Tell us About the Way We Think About This Core Social Structure

Abstract When people talk about kinship systems, they often use co-speech gestures and other representations to elaborate. This paper investigates such polysemiotic (spoken, gestured, and drawn) descriptions of kinship relations, to see if they display recurring patterns of conventionalization that capture specific social structures. We present an exploratory hypothesis-generating study of descriptions produced by a […]

Published on September 4, 2024

Exploring Early Number Abilities With Multimodal Transformers

Abstract Early number skills represent critical milestones in children’s cognitive development and are shaped over years of interacting with quantities and numerals in various contexts. Several connectionist computational models have attempted to emulate how certain number concepts may be learned, represented, and processed in the brain. However, these models mainly used highly simplified inputs and […]

Published on September 3, 2024