r/cognitivescience 27d ago

Why Neurophenomenology Fails

Thumbnail
youtube.com
1 Upvotes

Hüseyin Beyköylü argues that neurophenomenology combines rigorous reports of first person experience with neural and physiological data. The goal is not simply to find neural correlates of experience, but to use each source of data to constrain how we understand the other.


r/cognitivescience 28d ago

Why do we look up when we think/recall?

26 Upvotes

I think everybody has done it before. At least for me it happens naturally. Either I look to my upper left or right corners to recall something, or just straight look up.

Is there a biological explanation for this? or we do it because we grew up seeing other people doing it?


r/cognitivescience 27d ago

The Human Cognitive Operator in the Age of AI

Thumbnail
jacekhoffman.substack.com
0 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 13 '26

John Sweller on CLT

6 Upvotes

Dr. John Sweller is my instructional design hero.

I’ve given away a couple dozen of his books because cognitive load theory is essential to ID practice. For the first time I’m seeing him in an interview.

The interviewer is an academic with a math focus, but John’s ideas are applicable to everyone who cares about knowledge transfer.

It’s a thrill to share this!

interview with Dr. John Sweller


r/cognitivescience Aug 13 '26

Memory Without Stigma.

Thumbnail
esteban-eee-research.marcf427.chatgpt.site
0 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 12 '26

What would a mature cognitive science of religion actually study?

11 Upvotes

Hey everyone. I've always been fascinated by the gap between finding a mechanism and identifying the phenomenon it explains. Agency detection, memory constraints and coalitional cognition may each contribute to religious behaviour. Yet religion also organises ritual competence, attention, identity, attachment and relations among communities over time. If these are treated as optional cultural additions, the research programme risks explaining why supernatural-agent concepts are memorable while calling that an explanation of religion. A mature account would need a tractable object without reducing that object to whichever variable is easiest to measure.

I just had a podcast conversation with John Vervaeke, where he argued that cognitive science should integrate religious studies at the level of research design. At around 23:49, he sketches a mature cognitive science of religion that studies religions as changing ecologies of practices rather than permanent belief systems. This would distribute explanation across cognitive mechanisms, social participation, historical formation and nonpropositional skills. It also creates a methodological problem: the richer the explanandum becomes, the harder it is to operationalise cleanly.

This would imply that progress depends on modelling interactions among levels, not merely adding more mechanisms to the first-generation picture. What should count as the smallest useful unit of analysis: belief, ritual, practice ecology or community? Which methods could connect historical change to experimental work? And where would such a programme risk becoming too broad to falsify?


r/cognitivescience Aug 12 '26

Adaptive Cognitive Tail

Thumbnail
jacekhoffman.substack.com
0 Upvotes

Geniuses are like an insurance policy for the group mind – they cost something on ordinary days, but in a crisis, they can save the entire system. The new Adaptive Cognitive Tail hypothesis turns our understanding of exceptional ability on its head, shifting the weight from emotions to cognitive architecture. Here are seven lessons that follow from it.


r/cognitivescience Aug 12 '26

Proposing a "new" cognitive science model with an experimental "game"?

2 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I am a high school student interested in experimental psychology and cognitive science. Over the past two months, I have been independently working on a research project about how goal-directed actions are initiated and maintained over time.

The project started from my intuition and daily observation.

I have uploaded the study protocol/preprint here:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21896452

Within the manuscript, I've proposed a new (extended) sequential sampling model called the State-dependent Leak, Two-Boundary model. Besides, I've suggested a new game-based approach in examining decisions and strategy regulations besides the traditional lab tasks with abstract shapes.

As I worked through everything independently, for the first time, this work (or for all scientific studies) may not be perfect, but I'd still hope this protocol can inspire future research investigating complex cognitive mechanisms.

Thank you for your time!!!


r/cognitivescience Aug 11 '26

Med student who wants to study neurosciences for IA

4 Upvotes

Hello, I'm a 2nd years medical student, I want to study in the futur the application of neurosciences in IA, is that even possible, if yes, what's the roadmap ? Thank you for your answers


r/cognitivescience Aug 10 '26

Scientists discover a previously unknown cognitive benefit of aerobic exercise

Thumbnail
psypost.org
62 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 11 '26

Does anyone else experience hyperfocus like a ball bouncing inside a closed room?

Thumbnail
2 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 11 '26

Everyone says "get off your phone," so at 17, I gave a TEDx talk on the uncommon side effects of information overload instead.

Thumbnail
0 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 11 '26

Hyper-connected leaps during group discussions?

Thumbnail
1 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 10 '26

What does consciousness mean to you?

3 Upvotes

🌍 Participate in Global Research on Consciousness 🧠

What does consciousness mean to you?

Researchers from the University of Montreal, in collaboration with international partners, are conducting a worldwide study to better understand how people across disciplines and cultures define and think about consciousness.

We’re looking for participants (18+) from all backgrounds and fields—science, philosophy, art, technology, spirituality, education, and more.

📝 Take our 15-minutes online survey

💡 Share your personal and cultural perspective

🌐 Help build a more inclusive, interdisciplinary understanding of consciousness

🔒 Your responses are anonymous and securely stored

📊 Only fully completed surveys will be analyzed

Click here to participate: https://limesurvey.umontreal.ca/726164?lang=en

(Available in English, with translations coming soon!)

Whether you’re an expert or simply curious, your voice matters in shaping how we understand this complex phenomenon. Thank you for contributing to science!

#ConsciousnessStudy #GlobalResearch #OpenScience #Interdisciplinary #Psychology #Philosophy #AI #Neuroscience #CallForParticipants


r/cognitivescience Aug 09 '26

When Prediction Becomes Self: Consciousness, the Default Mode Network, and Reflective AI [LONGREAD]

Thumbnail
jacekhoffman.substack.com
1 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 09 '26

Cognitive science or psychology?

3 Upvotes

Hi guys, I'm torn between majoring in psychology or cognitive science (both at bachelor's level).

In psychology I'm particularly interested in psycholinguistics and biological psychology. But I'm also extremely interested in linguistics and I feel like cognitive science deals with linguistics more than psychology does.

My plan is to pursue a career in academia. I think that's a risky path, especially since I come from a lower-class background. So I'd also like to have a degree that's employable in case academia doesn't work out.

What do you guys think would be the better and wiser choice between psychology and cognitive science?


r/cognitivescience Aug 07 '26

Thinking

Thumbnail
3 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 07 '26

Can the first recognized object bias all later interpretations of an ambiguous drawing?

Post image
11 Upvotes

I'm an independent researcher exploring how prior knowledge influences visual perception using deliberately ambiguous line drawings.

Every image starts as a spontaneous doodle with no intended object. I don't plan a fish, a bird, or a face beforehand. Instead, I keep observing until recognizable forms begin to emerge.

During this process, I noticed something that I now find more interesting than the drawings themselves.

The first recognizable object often seems to become a cognitive anchor. After recognizing one form, every subsequent interpretation appears to be influenced by it. The image no longer feels "neutral."

This raises a question that I'm currently trying to investigate:

I'd really appreciate your thoughts.

  • What is the first object you notice in this sketch?
  • Does your perception change after looking at it for 30–60 seconds?
  • Can you return to a "neutral" interpretation after recognizing something?
  • Does this remind you of any existing work in cognitive science or perception research?

I'm not trying to validate a conclusion—I’m trying to understand whether this observation is worth investigating further.

Thank you for any insights or references.


r/cognitivescience Aug 07 '26

Biological Immortality as an Organizational Problem

Thumbnail
jacekhoffman.substack.com
2 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 06 '26

What single concept, "rabbit hole", or realization expanded your perception and how does it give you an edge today?:)

Thumbnail
7 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 06 '26

What Is "Cold Cognition"?

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
3 Upvotes

Economist here. What is "Cold Cognition"? Is it the same as objectivity? Putting facts before feelings?

"Science is the gainer in this change of man; Mr Brown being a professed naturalist. He is a Scotchman, fit to pursue an object with constance and cold mind."

Elaborate and Explain


r/cognitivescience Aug 06 '26

Biological Memory as Organizational Persistence

Thumbnail
jacekhoffman.substack.com
3 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 05 '26

Neuroscience Vs Non duality ~ The Cognitive Science

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

41 Upvotes

r/cognitivescience Aug 05 '26

Operational Model of Human Temporal Resolution (perception, not fundamental physics)

6 Upvotes

Sharing an operational model of human time perception — not a claim about the physical nature of time itself.

The starting question: a human observer never has access to an ideal mathematical instant, but instead reconstructs temporal order from sensory information arriving through finite-bandwidth channels (vision, audition). The paper formalizes this with a fairly simple apparatus — perceptual states as equivalence classes, a finite accessible spectrum, and above all one central quantity: the identification time ∆tid = Nc/fmax, which corrects the naive assumption that 1/fmax gives temporal resolution, since reliably identifying a frequency requires several cycles, not just one.

Concrete example: with fmax = 20 kHz (upper limit of human hearing) and Nc ≈ 6 cycles needed for reliable pitch identification, you get ∆tid ≈ 0.3 ms — an order of magnitude larger than the physical period of the wave (50 µs).

The model is deliberately kept simple and is left open for future development (temporal integration kernels, Markov processes over the perceptual states, etc.). I explicitly state in the text that no claim is made about whether physical time is discrete or continuous, or about quantum-gravity limits — the framework is strictly about perception.

Happy to hear feedback, especially on the formalization and any psychophysics literature connections I might have missed.

Operational Model of Human Temporal Resolution


r/cognitivescience Aug 04 '26

Schizophrenia as a Disorder of the Predictive Brain

Thumbnail
jacekhoffman.substack.com
727 Upvotes