Humans aren’t perfect – and neither are our brains. When solving problems, we often make mistakes or estimate an answer that’s good enough, but not exact. Typical methods to understanding cognition ignore these errors or treat them as random noise. But, in a recent article published in the Psychonomic Society journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, researchers propose […]
Reasoning/ Problem Solving
In the book of Genesis, Cain, who slayed his brother Abel in jealousy, was asked by God, where is your brother? Cain’s response was, “I know not; Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain’s sarcastic response suggested an unwillingness to take responsibility for his brother. Thankfully, in today’s society, the concept of serving as “My Brother’s […]
YouTube is (in)famous for its cat videos. An estimate from 2015, now surely superseded by masses of additional material, located more than 2 million cat videos on YouTube that collectively have been watched 25,000,000,000 times. Even if you are not a cat aficionado, there is at least one video that is worth watching. It explains […]
With the increased demand for computer programming skills in industries outside of technology, younger and younger kids are now taught the basics of computer science to prepare for future jobs. For example, when Amazon launched a program aiming to teach 10 million kids a year to code last week, it was because the company was […]
Suppose your task is to design a stylish aviator outfit for pigs. How would you go about doing that? You might find it helpful to know that the 1616 edition of John Withals’s English-Latin dictionary, A Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners, notes that “Pigs fly in the ayre with their tayles forward.” So you might […]
Learning basic arithmetic is a foundation of early math education. Algebra, trigonometry, and calculus are built on, among other things, the ability to quickly and easily solve math equations. Being able to solve math problems is also important for more general life purposes, like tipping, or paying taxes. For that reason, students should be able […]
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 […]