Trends in Cognitive Sciences

It will be in the show notes.

It's referenced by a later paper just titled Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and it's just called Review Cognitive Upfloating 2016.

And they actually asked the question, is Google making us stupid? And I found this interesting that this question has been paralleled in one of the later papers we're going to discuss.

This is your brain on chat GPT, where I guess the question became, is chat GPT making you stupid? And the answer in both cases is that you're asking the wrong question.

John Cacioppo, the University of Chicago neuroscientist who spent much of his career studying loneliness, described something with his colleague, Louise Hockley, that I think every senior leader should know.

In a 2009 review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, they laid out what perceived social isolation does to the way we think.

The key word is perceived.

They were studying the feeling of being isolated, which can exist in a completely full room.

about getting out of it.

The key paper hears Mikulajak, Gross, and Roskam in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

They define parental burnout as an exhaustion syndrome related to the parenting role, caused by a perceived gap between parenting resources and demands.

And the word doing the work in that sentence is perceived.

So what's this actually about? A product feature, or a claim about human cognition? I think it's a claim about cognition that happens to have a product attached, and the cognition half is older and better established than most people realize.

Garrett and Pickering, 2004, Trends in Cognitive Sciences The paper is called, Why is Conversation So Easy? Which is a good title because it's the question.

Their answer is that humans are designed for dialogue rather than monologue, and the mechanism is interactive alignment.

When two people talk, they automatically align their representations at every level.

But why? How can we hone this talent? You might be surprised to learn it is all about our face.

A study from the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences found that we can guess traits based on face shape.

For example, this is a computer rendering of an introverted and extroverted face.

Can you see the difference? Right now, pull up your Facebook or LinkedIn profile picture and compare your photo to these computer renderings.

John Cacioppo spent decades on this.

His work in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2009 laid it out.

Perceived social isolation, which is loneliness, is what drives the bad outcomes.

Poorer cognitive performance, faster cognitive decline, worse executive function, heightens sensitivity to social threat.

And a woman in the audience raised her hand and said, I'm actually working on something called Mooncrete, which is concrete that mixes lunar regolith and ice water from the moon's polar ice caps.

In the 2013 October issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Science, that sounds like a thrilling read, doesn't it? Academics ranked their top brain science movies of all time.

Top brain science.

Yeah, yeah.

This is the thread from our earlier conversation, and the peer-reviewed literature is unusually clean on it.

Mahewald, Ivanova, Blank, and others, Dissociating Language and Thought in Large Language Models in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2024.

They split the problem into formal versus functional competence.

Formal linguistic competence is knowledge of linguistic rules and patterns, syntax, morphology.