Cognitive Science

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

Sleep Loss and the Socio-Emotional Brain

Are you feeling emotionally fragile, moody, unpredictable, even ungenerous to those around you? Here, we review how and why these phenomena can occur as a result of insufficient sleep. Sleep loss disrupts a broad spectrum of affective processes, from basic emotional operations (e.g., recognition, responsivity, expression), through to high-order, complex socio-emotional functioning (e.g., loneliness, helping […]

Published on April 14, 2020

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