Cognitive Science

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

Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond

Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness (‘C-tests’) are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), […]

Published on March 14, 2024

Enriching Thinking Through Discourse

Abstract Great effort is invested in identifying ways to change people’s minds on an issue. A first priority should perhaps be enriching their thinking about the issue. With a goal of enriching their thinking, we studied the views of community adults on the DACA issue—young adults who entered the United States illegally as children. A […]

Published on March 14, 2024

Probing the Representational Structure of Regular Polysemy via Sense Analogy Questions: Insights from Contextual Word Vectors

Abstract Regular polysemes are sets of ambiguous words that all share the same relationship between their meanings, such as CHICKEN and LOBSTER both referring to an animal or its meat. To probe how a distributional semantic model, here exemplified by bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), represents regular polysemy, we analyzed whether its embeddings support […]

Published on March 14, 2024