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cognition

A blue virtual being, made of neural networks, plays with colorful blocks inside a glowing sphere
machine learning

By Exploring Virtual Worlds, AI Learns in New Ways

By Allison Whitten
June 24, 2022
Read Later

Intelligent beings learn by interacting with the world. Artificial intelligence researchers have adopted a similar strategy to teach their virtual agents new tricks.

2021 in Review

The Year in Biology

By John Rennie
December 21, 2021
Read Later

The detailed understanding of brains and multicellular bodies reached new heights this year, while the genomes of the COVID-19 virus and various organisms yielded more surprises.

Illustration of tangled branches that can also look like the folds in a brain.
neuroscience

To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions

By Anil Ananthaswamy
November 15, 2021
Read Later

Results from neural networks support the idea that brains are “prediction machines” — and that they work that way to conserve energy.

An illustration that shows words and music from an opera singer going into a listener’s brain.
neuroscience

The Brain Processes Speech in Parallel With Other Sounds

By Jordana Cepelewicz
October 21, 2021
Read Later

Scientists thought that the brain’s hearing centers might just process speech along with other sounds. But new work suggests that speech gets some special treatment very early on.

Photo of rat climbing through a lattice of thin rods.
neuroscience

How Animals Map 3D Spaces Surprises Brain Researchers

By Jordana Cepelewicz
October 14, 2021
Read Later

When animals move through 3D spaces, the neat system of grid cell activity they use for navigating on flat surfaces gets more disorderly. That has implications for some ideas about memory and other processes.

An artist’s conception of the ways that functional capacities have been mapped to regions of the brain.
neuroscience

The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does

By Jordana Cepelewicz
August 24, 2021
Read Later

Familiar categories of mental functions such as perception, memory and attention reflect our experience of ourselves, but they are misleading about how the brain works. More revealing approaches are emerging.

Photo of crows.
cognitive science

Animals Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go?

By Jordana Cepelewicz
August 9, 2021
Read Later

Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers.

A drawing of a mouse, with lines representing sensory data rotating 90 degrees to become lines of memory data.
neuroscience

The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations

By Jordana Cepelewicz
April 15, 2021
Read Later

Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference.

Animation of a neuron that periodically alters its responses to stimuli when it is reset into a new state by another input.
neural networks

Artificial Neural Nets Finally Yield Clues to How Brains Learn

By Anil Ananthaswamy
February 18, 2021
Read Later

The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn’t work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could.


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