{"title":"Learning by thinking in natural and artificial minds.","authors":"Tania Lombrozo","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.07.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.07.007","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Canonical cases of learning involve novel observations external to the mind, but learning can also occur through mental processes such as explaining to oneself, mental simulation, analogical comparison, and reasoning. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) reveal that such learning is not restricted to human minds: artificial minds can also self-correct and arrive at new conclusions by engaging in processes of 'learning by thinking' (LbT). How can elements already in the mind generate new knowledge? This article aims to resolve this paradox, and in so doing highlights an important feature of natural and artificial minds - to navigate uncertain environments with variable goals, minds with limited resources must construct knowledge representations 'on demand'. LbT supports this construction.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":16.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142299474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Testing the unit of working memory manipulation.","authors":"Liqiang Huang","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.09.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.09.008","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Ji et al. investigated the unit of working memory manipulation. Participants were asked to update either the color or location of memorized information. Task difficulty depended on the number of Boolean maps involved, rather than the number of objects, suggesting that Boolean maps, not objects, are the units of manipulation.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":16.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142331008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Response to Goddu et al.: new ways of characterizing and acquiring knowledge.","authors":"Ilker Yildirim, L A Paul","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.08.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.08.004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":16.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142299476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"LLMs don't know anything: reply to Yildirim and Paul.","authors":"Mariel K Goddu, Alva Noë, Evan Thompson","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.06.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.06.008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":16.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142299475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mathias Osvath, Pavel Němec, Stephen L Brusatte, Lawrence M Witmer
{"title":"Thought for food: the endothermic brain hypothesis.","authors":"Mathias Osvath, Pavel Němec, Stephen L Brusatte, Lawrence M Witmer","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.08.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.08.002","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The evolution of whole-body endothermy occurred independently in dinosaurs and mammals and was associated with some of the most significant neurocognitive shifts in life's history. These included a 20-fold increase in neurons and the evolution of new brain structures, supporting similar functions in both lineages. We propose the endothermic brain hypothesis, which holds that elaborations in endotherm brains were geared towards increasing caloric intake through efficient foraging. The hypothesis is grounded in the intrinsic coupling of cognition and organismic self-maintenance. We argue that coevolution of increased metabolism and new forms of cognition should be jointly investigated in comparative studies of behaviors and brain anatomy, along with studies of fossil species. We suggest avenues for such research and highlight critical open questions.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":16.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142146678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bilingualism modifies cognition through adaptation, not transfer.","authors":"Ellen Bialystok","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.07.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.07.012","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The standard explanation for bilingual effects on cognition is that an aspect of language processing transfers to nonverbal cognitive performance, leading to improvements in executive functioning. However, much evidence is incompatible with that view, and transfer across those domains seems unlikely. The present argument is that bilingual experience modifies cognition through an adaptation to the underlying attention system, making attention more efficient. 'Transfer' focuses on the overlap of specific processes, so task similarity predicts outcomes. By contrast, 'adaptation' focuses on recruitment of the modified resource, so the degree of attention required predicts outcome. In this view, bilinguals require less attentional effort than monolinguals for similar levels of performance, and outperform monolinguals on tasks with high attention demands regardless of task similarity.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":16.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11540729/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142009780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"High-level visual cognition deep down in the brain.","authors":"Baiwei Liu, Freek van Ede","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.10.010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.10.010","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A recent study by Peysakhovich and colleagues reveals how the superior colliculus (SC), a deep brain structure commonly associated with spatial orienting and motor control, causally contributes to the abstraction of visual categories. This highlights how subcortical areas with motor-control labels may have central roles in high-level visual cognition and opens avenues for investigation.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":16.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142565264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Franziska Bröker, Lori L Holt, Brett D Roads, Peter Dayan, Bradley C Love
{"title":"Demystifying unsupervised learning: how it helps and hurts.","authors":"Franziska Bröker, Lori L Holt, Brett D Roads, Peter Dayan, Bradley C Love","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.09.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.09.005","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Humans and machines rarely have access to explicit external feedback or supervision, yet manage to learn. Most modern machine learning systems succeed because they benefit from unsupervised data. Humans are also expected to benefit and yet, mysteriously, empirical results are mixed. Does unsupervised learning help humans or not? Here, we argue that the mixed results are not conflicting answers to this question, but reflect that humans self-reinforce their predictions in the absence of supervision, which can help or hurt depending on whether predictions and task align. We use this framework to synthesize empirical results across various domains to clarify when unsupervised learning will help or hurt. This provides new insights into the fundamentals of learning with implications for instruction and lifelong learning.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":16.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142367187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The process of gendering: gender as a verb.","authors":"Ashley E Martin, Michael L Slepian","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.09.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.09.004","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Gender is important to the social and cognitive sciences, as evidenced by hundreds of meta-analyses, thousands of studies, and millions of datapoints that examine how gender (as an independent variable) shapes cognition and behavior. In this expansive literature, gender is often understood as a noun - a social category that separates 'men' from 'women'. However, gender can also be studied and understood as a verb - a cognitive process used to conceptually divide both human and non-human entities by masculinity and femininity. In this review, we outline the cognitive process of gendering and propose a framework to understand gender as a verb that enables a better understanding of how gender operates, why it is important, and how it can change.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":16.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142559214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Whole-to-part development in language creation.","authors":"Susan Goldin-Meadow, Inbal Arnon","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2024.09.015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.09.015","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Children approach language by learning parts and constructing wholes. But they can also first learn wholes and then discover parts. We demonstrate this understudied yet impactful process in children creating language without input. Whole-to-part learning thus need not be driven by hard-to-segment input and is a bias that children bring to language.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":16.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142548557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}