Cognitive Skill Acquisition

Chunks amidst the ruins of Giuoco Pianissimo: Superior expert memory for random domain-relevant material

In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked, what’s it like to be a bat? I am not sure that this question has been answered satisfactorily, so maybe we should focus on a slightly more circumscribed variant of the same question: What’s it like to be a chess grand master? Cognitive scientists have been addressing this […]

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Ir nugalėtojas yra: from 0 to a little Lithuanian in an hour

And the winner is….. in 2014, cognitive scientists from University College London launched an international competition, with a $10,000 prize, to find the best way of tackling a challenge faced by millions every day, namely how best to acquire the vocabulary of a new language. Prof David Shanks and Dr Rosalind Potts from UCL teamed […]

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Working memory workout: Training bench presses does not help you throw a ball

Few areas of psychology research are as controversial as ‘brain training’. For the last 10 years, we have seen an influx of apps and games that purport to improve users’ cognitive capabilities. The appeal is simple. Play a game, get smarter. The controversy, as we’ve covered here, is that unbiased research on whether brain training […]

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