As we count up, number words that occur later in our count denote greater quantities. Here, we tested whether children's understanding of this “later-greater” principle originates from associating nu...

The dominant account of social media's epistemic harms focuses on the spread of misinformation and the production of false beliefs at scale. This paper argues that the misinformation narrative, whate...

A skill for rapid learning. Contribute to thisisnic/rapid-learning development by creating an account on GitHub.

Humans rely on complex social learning and collective adaptation to navigate dynamically changing environments. The authors show that human collective intelligence in a dynamic, naturalistic task depe...

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The nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.

Non-contingent learning data can produce an apparent “illusory” or “false” perception of causality (“causal illusion”), especially if a potential caus…

People change across daily situations and life transformations, yet maintain a stable sense of self. Explaining this stability requires understanding how identities, traits, values, and memories inter...