Cognitive Science

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

All Thinking is ‘Wishful’ Thinking

People often seek new information and eagerly update their beliefs. Other times they avoid information or resist revising their beliefs. What explains those different reactions? Answers to this question often frame information processing as a competition between cognition and motivation. Here, we dissolve this dichotomy by bringing together two theoretical frameworks: epistemic motivation and active […]

Published on April 12, 2020

Who Is to Blame? Children’s and Adults’ Moral Judgments Regarding Victim and Transgressor Negligence

Abstract Research has documented that individuals consider outcomes, intentions, and transgressor negligence when making morally relevant judgments (Nobes, Panagiotaki, & Engelhardt, 2017). However, less is known about whether individuals attend to both victim and transgressor negligence in their evaluations. The current study measured 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds (N = 70), 7‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 54), and adults’ (N = 97, ages […]

Published on April 11, 2020

EARSHOT: A Minimal Neural Network Model of Incremental Human Speech Recognition

Abstract Despite the lack of invariance problem (the many‐to‐many mapping between acoustics and percepts), human listeners experience phonetic constancy and typically perceive what a speaker intends. Most models of human speech recognition (HSR) have side‐stepped this problem, working with abstract, idealized inputs and deferring the challenge of working with real speech. In contrast, carefully engineered […]

Published on April 10, 2020