Cognitive Science

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

Noise, Economy, and the Emergence of Information Structure in a Laboratory Language

Abstract The acceptability of sentences in natural language is constrained not only grammaticality, but also by the relationship between what is being conveyed and such factors as context and the beliefs of interlocutors. In many languages the critical element in a sentence (its focus) must be given grammatical prominence. There are different accounts of the […]

Published on February 25, 2019

Learning From Peers’ Eye Movements in the Absence of Expert Guidance: A Proof of Concept Using Laboratory Stock Trading, Eye Tracking, and Machine Learning

Abstract Existing research shows that people can improve their decision skills by learning what experts paid attention to when faced with the same problem. However, in domains like financial education, effective instruction requires frequent, personalized feedback given at the point of decision, which makes it time‐consuming for experts to provide and thus, prohibitively costly. We […]

Published on February 25, 2019

A Dopaminergic Basis for Fear Extinction

It is a joyous relief when an event we dread fails to materialize. In fear extinction, the appetitive nature of an omitted aversive event is not a mere epiphenomenon but drives the reduction of fear responses and the formation of long-term extinction memories. Dopamine emerges as key neurobiological mediator of these related processes. Read Full […]

Published on February 23, 2019