Cognitive Science

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

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

Understanding the Role of Eye Movement Pattern and Consistency in Isolated English Word Reading Through Hidden Markov Modeling

Abstract In isolated English word reading, readers have the optimal performance when their initial eye fixation is directed to the area between the beginning and word center, that is, the optimal viewing position (OVP). Thus, how well readers voluntarily direct eye gaze to this OVP during isolated word reading may be associated with reading performance. […]

Published on September 3, 2024