Cognitive Science

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

Generating Relations Elicits a Relational Mindset in Children

Abstract Relational reasoning is a hallmark of human higher cognition and creativity, yet it is notoriously difficult to encourage in abstract tasks, even in adults. Generally, young children initially focus more on objects, but with age become more focused on relations. While prerequisite knowledge and cognitive resource maturation partially explains this pattern, here we propose […]

Published on October 11, 2019

The Faulty Magnitude Detector: Why SNARC‐Like Tasks Cannot Support a Generalized Magnitude System

Abstract Do people represent space, time, number, and other conceptual domains using a generalized magnitude system (GMS)? To answer this question, numerous studies have used the spatial‐numerical association of response codes (SNARC) task and its variants. Yet, for a combination of reasons, SNARC‐like effects cannot provide evidence for a GMS, even in principle. Rather, these […]

Published on October 11, 2019

Neural Entrainment and Attentional Selection in the Listening Brain

The streams of sounds we typically attend to abound in acoustic regularities. Neural entrainment is seen as an important mechanism that the listening brain exploits to attune to these regularities and to enhance the representation of attended sounds. We delineate the neurophysiology underlying this mechanism and review entrainment alongside its more pragmatic signature, often called […]

Published on October 10, 2019