Cognitive Science

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

Sad Art Gives Voice to Our Own Sadness

Abstract People tend to show greater liking for expressions of sadness when these expressions are described as art. Why does this effect arise? One obvious hypothesis would be that describing something as art makes people more likely to regard it as fictional, and people prefer expressions of sadness that are not real. We contrast this […]

Published on January 21, 2025

The Confrustion Constellation: A New Way of Looking at Confusion and Frustration

Abstract There has been considerable research on confusion and frustration that has treated them as two unitary constructs, distinct from each other. In this article, we argue that there is instead a constellation of different types of confusion and frustration, with different antecedents, manifestations, and impacts, and that the commonalities between many types of confusion […]

Published on January 21, 2025

Simple Auto‐Associative Networks Succeed at Universal Generalization of the Identity Function and Reduplication Rule

Abstract It has become widely accepted that standard connectionist models are unable to show identity-based relational reasoning that requires universal generalization. The purpose of this brief report is to show how one of the simplest forms of such models, feed-forward auto-associative networks, satisfies two of the most well-known challenges: universal generalization of the identity function […]

Published on January 16, 2025