Dear Friends of Cognition (International Journal of Cognitive Science), Recently the editorial team of the journal Lingua, led by Johan Rooryck, petitioned Elsevier to support a transition to a Fair Open Access model of publishing (as described below). When Elsevier rejected this proposal, the 6 Editors of Lingua resigned en masse, and created a new … Continue reading
Contributed by David Barner (with Katherine Wagner & Katharine Tillman) Humans can think and talk about many things that we can’t directly see or touch. Neutrinos. Infinity. Justice. The nature of time. But humans are not natural-born physicists or mathematicians. Somehow, we learn these abstract concepts. But how could we learn about things that we … Continue reading
In what is becoming a nearly routine event, we learned today of yet another mass killing in the US: A young man bearing multiple firearms entered the campus of a community college in the Pacific Northwest and killed at least 9 people – apparently strangers. The regularity of these tragic events in the US has put … Continue reading
Contributed by Mike Frank & David Barner (see this post also on Babies Learning Language). The first calculating machines invented by humans – stone tablets with grooves that contained counting stones or “calculi” – are no match for contemporary computers in terms of computational power. But they and their descendants, in the form of the modern Soroban abacus, may have … Continue reading
Recently I wrote about the dirty little secret in academia: That the majority of PhD students do not end up in faculty positions, but instead work in government, for NGOs, or elsewhere in industry. In that piece, I argued that (1) this situation isn’t entirely new, (2) interpreting it as a type of failure makes assumptions about … Continue reading
Contributed by David Barner The origins of human mathematical practices extend back in history to the earliest moments of human culture. Early cuneiform writing systems not only arose in large part for the purposes of accounting and trade, but the presence of numerical symbols in these systems has sometimes been the wedge that allowed historians to crack their … Continue reading
Contributed by David Barner Which currently active scientist has had the biggest impact on your life? This is a difficult question, and one that hinges upon what we mean by “impact” in the first place. You might think that the most impactful researcher works on cancer. Or perhaps physics. And if you guessed physics – … Continue reading
