Cognitive Science

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

Solving Bongard Problems With a Visual Language and Pragmatic Constraints

Abstract More than 50 years ago, Bongard introduced 100 visual concept learning problems as a challenge for artificial vision systems. These problems are now known as Bongard problems. Although they are well known in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, only very little progress has been made toward building systems that can solve a substantial subset […]

Published on May 3, 2024

The Thermodynamics of Mind

To not only survive, but also thrive, the brain must efficiently orchestrate distributed computation across space and time. This requires hierarchical organisation facilitating fast information transfer and processing at the lowest possible metabolic cost. Quantifying brain hierarchy is difficult but can be estimated from the asymmetry of information flow. Thermodynamics has successfully characterised hierarchy in […]

Published on April 27, 2024

Raising the Roof: Situating Verbs in Symbolic and Embodied Language Processing

Abstract Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task-dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word’s referent. A primary finding of literature […]

Published on April 25, 2024