Cognitive Science

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

Statistically Induced Chunking Recall: A Memory‐Based Approach to Statistical Learning

Abstract The computations involved in statistical learning have long been debated. Here, we build on work suggesting that a basic memory process, chunking , may account for the processing of statistical regularities into larger units. Drawing on methods from the memory literature, we developed a novel paradigm to test statistical learning by leveraging a robust […]

Published on July 2, 2020

Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children’s Wh‐Questions

Abstract Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well‐known examples is medial wh‐question errors in English‐speaking children’s wh‐questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? from Thornton, 1990). The evidence for this non‐target‐like […]

Published on July 1, 2020

Neurons as Canonical Correlation Analyzers

Normative models of neural computation offer simplified yet lucid mathematical descriptions of murky biological phenomena. Previously, online Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to model a network of single-compartment neurons accounting for weighted summation of upstream neural activity in the soma and Hebbian/anti-Hebbian synaptic learning rules. However, synaptic plasticity in biological neurons often depends on […]

Published on July 1, 2020