Cognitive Science

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

Track It to Crack It: Dissecting Processing Stages with Finger Tracking

A central goal in cognitive science is to parse the series of processing stages underlying a cognitive task. A powerful yet simple behavioral method that can resolve this problem is finger trajectory tracking: by continuously tracking the finger position and speed as a participant chooses a response, and by analyzing which stimulus features affect the […]

Published on November 1, 2019

Overinformative Speakers Are Cooperative: Revisiting the Gricean Maxim of Quantity

Abstract A pragmatic account of referential communication is developed which presents an alternative to traditional Gricean accounts by focusing on cooperativeness and efficiency, rather than informativity. The results of four language‐production experiments support the view that speakers can be cooperative when producing redundant adjectives, doing so more often when color modification could facilitate the listener’s […]

Published on October 31, 2019

ShuTu: Open-Source Software for Efficient and Accurate Reconstruction of Dendritic Morphology

Neurons perform computations by integrating inputs from thousands of synapses—mostly in the dendritic tree—to drive action potential firing in the axon. One fruitful approach to studying this process is to record from neurons using patch-clamp electrodes, fill the recorded neurons with a substance that allows subsequent staining, reconstruct the three-dimensional architectures of the dendrites, and […]

Published on October 31, 2019