Modeling the genius of babies: Guidelines for simulations of basic rule learning

The idea that babies have capabilities beyond our recognition is one that has been expressed in many different forms across the years, such as in children’s television shows (e.g., Nickelodeon’s Rugrats and a few ill-fated movies (Baby’s Day Out, Baby Geniuses, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2). A common theme in these shows and movies is that […]

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Why we don’t serve “cheese and macaroni”: Investigating directionality of relationships between words

We have become experts at remembering pieces of information that share no natural relationships. For example, your friend may have just started a new job, and it is easy for you to remember where she works because the company’s logo and her favorite color are both red. When thinking about remembering two pieces of information, […]

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Context is everything—but what is context? Disentangling the “what” from the “when”

An old but common adage is that “context is everything”, and while this aphorism can be applied to many different topics, it has been especially significant in theories of memory. Even in early psychological research, theorists believed that having knowledge and memory for an item meant connecting it to the “context which the world provides”, […]

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