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3 weeks ago | 
royalsocietypublishing.org | Laura Lewis |Esther Herrmann |Alejandro Sánchez-Amaro |Alison Gopnik
Curiosity is critical to learning and enables innovative behaviour and efficient information gathering [1–8]. Curiosity has deep phylogenetic and developmental roots in primates, and allows an individual to improve prediction, reduce uncertainty and gain increased control on their environment [2–4,9,10].
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Mar 13, 2025 | 
science.org | Lianjie Miao |Nikos Koundouros |Henry Farrell |Alison Gopnik
Information & AuthorsPublished In ScienceVolume 387 | Issue 673914 March 2025Article versionsSubmission historyPublished in print: 14 March 2025PermissionsRequest permissions for this article. AcknowledgmentsAll authors contributed equally to this work. J.E. began a visiting researcher affiliation with Google after this manuscript was submitted.
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Aug 16, 2024 | 
creativitypost.com | Joanne Foster |Eunice Yiu |Eliza Kosoy |Alison Gopnik
“Next-levelling” involves advancing—pushing forward, upward, outward, or onward. It requires effort, and initiative. It’s important at the outset of a new academic year or school term, but it’s equally important as a school year ramps up and gets into full swing. Whether kids’ pursuits have to do with creative endeavors, educational programs, interests (such as sports, art, music, technology, trucks), or something else altogether—there’s always room for growth.
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Jul 24, 2024 | 
oecs.mit.edu | Alison Gopnik
Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Over the past 20 years, cognitive scientists have applied advances in our understanding of causation in philosophy and computer science, particularly within the Causal Bayes Net formalism, to understand human causal learning. The formalism specifies a probabilistic generative model that describes the causal relations between variables.
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Jul 1, 2024 | 
creativitypost.com | Joanne Foster |Eunice Yiu |Eliza Kosoy |Alison Gopnik
Over my 40-plus year career as an academic clinician working with highly able (i.e., gifted and talented; high ability) children and youth, I have observed with keen interest and even fascination the maturing development of the related fields of gifted education, expertise, and talent development. In my opinion, there now are a few critically important, irrefutable facts that those who work with high ability children can agree upon.
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Jun 20, 2024 | 
nature.com | Kelsey Allen |Franziska Brändle |Matthew Botvinick |Judith E. Fan |Samuel J. Gershman |Alison Gopnik | +14 more
AbstractBoard, card or video games have been played by virtually every individual in the world. Games are popular because they are intuitive and fun. These distinctive qualities of games also make them ideal for studying the mind. By being intuitive, games provide a unique vantage point for understanding the inductive biases that support behaviour in more complex, ecological settings than traditional laboratory experiments.
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Apr 24, 2024 | 
fivebooks.com | Luciano Floridi |Alison Gopnik |Stuart Russell |Carissa Véliz
Before we talk about your recommended books specifically, I wonder if you might walk us through why it’s so crucial to think about the ethics of technology. For me it begins with the observation that there are no neutral tools. The tech historian Melvin Kranzberg first said this in the 1980s, but it bears repeating. Similarly, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.
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Apr 24, 2024 | fivebooks.com | Luciano Floridi |Alison Gopnik |Stuart Russell |Carissa Véliz
Before we talk about your recommended books specifically, I wonder if you might walk us through why it’s so crucial to think about the ethics of technology. For me it begins with the observation that there are no neutral tools. The tech historian Melvin Kranzberg first said this in the 1980s, but it bears repeating. Similarly, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.
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Apr 23, 2024 | 
journals.sagepub.com | Wendy Wood |Randi Martin |Alison Gopnik |Robert Gropp
In December 2022, the Board of Directors of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) became aware of specific concerns about the editorial practices of Klaus Fiedler, then the editor-in-chief (EIC) of the APS journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. These concerns were not reported directly to APS; rather, a manuscript detailing these issues was publicly disseminated by its author, Steven O. Roberts, including correspondence with the editor.
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Mar 4, 2024 | 
fillingthepail.substack.com | Alison Gopnik |Greg Ashman
Alfie Kohn is an unapologetic supporter of progressive education, that long educational tradition that has promised so much and delivered so little. While others sympathetic to the cause play word games and smuggle their ideas into practice under a bewildering variety of ever-changing names, Kohn has remained admirably willing to hoist the standard, unapologetically. Now, in a new blog post with many footnotes, he has taken aim at cognitive load theory.
