What does it mean for something to be complex? Fundamentally, complexity is a cue that something is less easily represented by our minds. With this fact in view, complexity becomes a tool: By understa...

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Cognitive maps are essential for navigation, but to what extent are they involved in thinking more broadly? In this opinion article, we examine whethe…

Weber's law is a rare quantitative regularity in psychology, yet its origins remain debated. Here we provide causal evidence that it arises from the more fundamental principle of efficient coding. Thi...

Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general li...

Are 25 year olds really more random than 60 year olds?

The Spatial Cognition Lab studies how we perceive, represent, and interact with the spatial world around us — all in the service of understanding how the mind works in general. We're also interested i...

Abstract. Each day brings new experiences and the opportunity to form new episodic memories. However, our everyday experiences are not isolated episodes; rather, there is significant spatial and tempo...

When we investigate busy visual scenes, how do we estimate the number of objects that we see? Most work on number perception answers this question by focusing on properties of the to-be-estimated set...

Our experience of time is often distorted in striking ways. Although prior work has shown that boundaries between events can shape temporal perception…

This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

The hippocampus supports episodic memories in development, and yet how the brain stabilizes these memories determines their long-term accessibility. This study examined how episodic memories formed in...

In much recent philosophy of mind and cognitive science, repulsive adaptation effects are considered a litmus test — a crucial marker, that distinguis…

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Podcast: This guest's research uncovers a surprising illusion: Repeated experiences, which are more vividly remembered, are often perceived as having occurred further in the past than they did.