Elite athletes are highly specialised decision-makers because they practise it every day, which is why, on many cognitive tasks, they’re smarter than ‘the average Joe ..read more

SrideeStudio/Shutterstock School mathematics teaching is stuck in the past. An adult revisiting the school that they attended as a child would see only superficial changes from what they experienced themselves. Yes, in some schools they might see a room full of electronic tablets, or the teacher using a touch-sensitive, interactive whiteboard. But if we zoom in on the details – the tasks that students are actually being given to help them make sense of the subject – things have hardly changed at all. We’ve learnt a huge amount in recent years about cognitive science – how our brains work and h ..read more

Noam Chomsky, the revered and reviled genius once famously described as “the most important intellectual alive”, turns 95 today. He is a monumental figure in modern linguistics, and only a slightly lesser deity in psychology, philosophy and political activism. His work establishing cognitive science as a discipline is so fundamental to the rise of AI that it’s rarely acknowledged anymore. Amid the ongoing alarm that language-simulating machines could become a net negative for humanity, have we wandered too far from Chomsky’s vision of a science of the human mind? The root of Chomsky’s fame Cho ..read more

Eugene Shelestov/Pexels Have you ever encountered a subpar hotel breakfast while on holiday? You don’t really like the food choices on offer, but since you already paid for the meal as part of your booking, you force yourself to eat something anyway rather than go down the road to a cafe. Economists and social scientists argue that such behaviour can happen due to the “sunk cost fallacy” – an inability to ignore costs that have already been spent and can’t be recovered. In the hotel breakfast example, the sunk cost is the price you paid for the hotel package: at the time of deciding where to e ..read more

Language AI's have trouble weighing potential gains and losses. Andrea Pistolesi/Stone via Getty Images The past few years have seen an explosion of progress in large language model artificial intelligence systems that can do things like write poetry, conduct humanlike conversations and pass medical school exams. This progress has yielded models like ChatGPT that could have major social and economic ramifications ranging from job displacements and increased misinformation to massive productivity boosts. Despite their impressive abilities, large language models don’t actually think. They tend t ..read more

What does something have to have to give us pleasure? Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash We humans, like other cognitive systems, are sensitive to our environment. We use sensory information to guide our behaviour. To be in the world. We decide how to act based on the hedonic value we assign to objects, people, situations or events. We seek out and engage in behaviours that lead to positive or rewarding outcomes and avoid those that lead to negative or punitive consequences. We construct our knowledge of the world according to how much we like elements of the environment, and we do so by learning and ge ..read more

Shutterstock In the early 1990s, British neuroscientist Karl Friston was poring over brain scans. The scans produced terabytes of digital output, and Friston had to find new techniques to sort and classify the massive flows of data. Along the way he had a revelation. The techniques he was using might be similar to what the brain itself was doing when it processed visual data. Could it be he had stumbled upon a solution to a data engineering problem that nature had discovered long ago? Friston’s eureka moment led to a “theory of everything”, which claims to explain the behaviour of the brain ..read more

Good news for parents... PR Image Factory/Shutterstock Many parents feel guilty when their children play video games for hours on end. Some even worry it could make their children less clever. And, indeed, that’s a topic scientists have clashed over for years. In our new study, we investigated how video games affect the minds of children, interviewing and testing more than 5,000 children aged ten to 12. And the results, published in Scientific Reports, will be surprising to some. Children were asked how many hours a day they spent on social media, watching videos or TV, and playing video games ..read more

Reason is not the only factor that guides vaccine decisions. Understanding human decision-making is the first step in changing behaviour. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito When the Green Bay Packers lost a playoff game to the San Francisco 49ers on Jan. 22, Twitter users were quick to roast Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ anti-vaccination beliefs. Rodgers misled his teammates about his vaccination status before testing positive for COVID-19 last November, revealing he was unvaccinated and stating that he was a critical thinker who had done his own research. Responses to Rodgers’ admission i ..read more

You might just be getting better at the game you're practicing. Malcolm Lightbody/Unsplash, CC BY You’ve probably seen ads for apps promising to make you smarter in just a few minutes a day. Hundreds of so-called “brain training” programs can be purchased for download. These simple games are designed to challenge mental abilities, with the ultimate goal of improving the performance of important everyday tasks. But can just clicking away at animations of swimming fish or flashed streets signs on your phone really help you improve the way your brain functions? Two large groups of scientists and ..read more