Cognitive Science

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

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

Extracting Reproducible Time-Resolved Resting State Networks Using Dynamic Mode Decomposition

Resting state networks (RSNs) extracted from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans are believed to reflect the intrinsic organization and network structure of brain regions. Most traditional methods for computing RSNs typically assume these functional networks are static throughout the duration of a scan lasting 5–15 min. However, they are known to vary on timescales […]

Published on October 31, 2019