Category: Biology of Information
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Blocking of associative learning by explicit descriptions
“Blocking of associative learning by explicit descriptions” People given written descriptions often learn and decide differently from those learning from experience, even in formally identical tasks. This paper presents two experiments detailing how telling participants about the value of one stimulus impacts a keystone learning effect – blocking. The paper investigates if descriptions can be…
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Computational Framework for cognitive biology
“Toward a computational framework for cognitive biology: Unifying approaches from cognitive neuroscience and comparative cognition” Progress in understanding cognition requires a quantitative, theoretical framework, grounded in the other natural sciences and able to bridge between implementational, algorithmic and computational levels of explanation. This review article reviews recent results in neuroscience and cognitive biology that, when combined, provide key components…
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Brain-body physiology
“Brain-body physiology: Local, reflex, and central communication” Behavior is tightly synchronized with bodily physiology. Internal needs from the body drive behavior selection, while optimal behavior performance requires a coordinated physiological response. Internal state is dynamically represented by the nervous system to influence mood and emotion, and body-brain signals also direct responses to external sensory cues,…
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Divergent Perception: Framing Creative Cognition
“Divergent Perception: Framing Creative Cognition Through the Lens of Sensory Flexibility” “Savoir regarder est un moyen d’inventer.” Salvador Dali. Creativity is a cornerstone of human evolution and is typically defined as the multifaceted ability to produce novel and useful artifacts. Although much research has focused on divergent thinking, growing evidence underscores the importance of perceptual…
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Towards embodied intelligence
“Intelligent soft matter: towards embodied intelligence” Intelligent soft matter lies at the intersection of materials science, physics, and cognitive science, promising to change how we design and interact with materials. This transformative field aims to create materials with life-like capabilities, such as perception, learning, memory, and adaptive behavior. Unlike traditional materials, which typically perform static…
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Known and Unknown Biases
“Known and Unknown Biases: A Framework for Contextualising and Identifying Bias in Animal Behaviour Research“ (This article discusses the bias in animal behaviour research, but – as known to most readers, I hope – humanes too are members of the animal kingdom 🙂 Biases in animal behaviour research are inevitable consequences of our societal and…
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A Model of Creative Thinking
“Adaptive Decision-Making “Fast” and “Slow”: A Model of Creative Thinking” The late Daniel Kahneman introduced the concept of fast and slow thinking, representing two distinct cognitive systems involved in decision-making (DM). Fast thinking (System 1) operates intuitively and spontaneously. In contrast, slow thinking (System 2) is characterized by deliberation and analytical reasoning. Following Kahneman’s view, called the…
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The Idealized Mind
The Idealized Mind: From Model-Based Science to Cognitive Science.The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding and support from MIT Press Direct to Open A defense of scientific realism based on the role of idealization in the cognitive sciences. We study nature, including the mind and brain, by building scientific models.…
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Pathfinding: a neurodynamical account of intuition
Pathfinding: a neurodynamical account of intuition We examine the neurobiology of intuition, a term often inconsistently defined in scientific literature. While researchers generally agree that intuition represents “an experienced-based process resulting in a spontaneous tendency toward a hunch or hypothesis,” we establish a firmer neurobiological foundation by framing intuition evolutionarily as a pathfinding mechanism emerging…
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Plasticity: A network theory
“Plasticity in mental health: A network theory“ Plasticity is the ability to modify brain and behavior, ultimately promoting an amplification of the impact of the context on the individual’s mental health. Thus, plasticity is not beneficial per se but its value depends on contextual factors, such as the quality of the living environment. High plasticity is…
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Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience
“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures“ As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research approaches in neuroscience that we describe as ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. Bottom-up neuroscience The bottom-up research culture…
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Therapy That Isn’t Psychotherapy
I found this nice discours on an interesting topic, related with individual challlenges, AI and related tools appearing in this relation. Therapy That Isn’t Psychotherapy by Steven Reidbord Reducing the problem to a merely external one leads to therapy that resembles political advocacy; therapy that prizes agreement (“validation”) over all else; therapy that absolves the patient…
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Resilience phenotypes derived from an active inference account of allostasis
“Resilience phenotypes derived from an active inference account of allostasis“:Within a theoretical framework of enactive allostasis, we explore active inference strategies for minimizing surprise to achieve resilience in dynamic environments. While individual differences and extrinsic protective factors traditionally account for variability in resilience trajectories following stressor exposure, the enactive model emphasizes the importance of the…
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Top-down influences
“Top-down influences on the perception of emotional stimuli” (also available as PDF) The ability to quickly and accurately perceive external emotional stimuli — events in the environment that evoke changes in feelings, physiology and behaviour — is vital for adaptive social interactions and effective decision making in everyday life. Contemporary theories of emotional perception emphasize the influence of top-down…
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Rhythmic Footstep (& Sound) Interactions on Creativity
“The Effects of Rhythmic Footstep and Sound Interactions on Creativity: A Design and Evaluation Study“ Existing research has explored how walking can stimulate creativity through the rhythm of footsteps. Innovators (e.g., Steve Jobs and Murakami Haruki)have mentioned that walking can stimulate their creativity when integrated with attention focus and footstep awareness Researchers have also studied…
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Greatness Cannot Be Planned
Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated — and nearly everything in-between — our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned—The Myth of…
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Blink and you see it
“Blink and you see it“ Every few seconds, our visual world disappears behind a thin fold of skin that maintains the tear film on the corneal surface and, for more than a tenth of a second, blocks light from falling onto the retina. “Blink and you miss it” is a common idiom that captures how…
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“mundane behaviours resembles a drug”
The problem extends across the globe. Researchers have studied compulsive shopping in many countries, including the United States, Turkey, Poland, Germany, India, Brazil, South Korea and Pakistan — where almost one-third of university students were classified as compulsive buyers in both physical stores and online.Heping He, a marketing researcher at Shenzhen University in China, is…
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‘We are kin to everything’
From the Nature Briefing of March 5, 2025 In her hit 2013 book, Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, made the argument for bringing together knowledge from Western and Indigenous science. In The Serviceberry, she turns her microscope on the damaging disconnects between capitalist economics and the circular economy…
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A Drive to Survive
“A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life“ How the purposive behavior of living systems outstrips the constraints of the free energy principle. Since 2005, Karl Friston’s proposal that the principle of free energy minimization underpins the purposive behavior of living agents has evolved through thousands of publications. This principle’s central…
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