According to a recent account of disinformation, disinformation is content that “generates ignorance” (Simion 2024a; 2024b). The view improves upon previous accounts that focused upon the potential fo...

According to Futrell and Mahowald [arXiv:2501.17047], both infants and language models (LMs) find attested languages easier to learn than impossible languages that have unnatural structures. We review...

Visual Attention in Crisis - Volume 48

An argument for replacing Chomsky’s set-theoretic Merge view of syntax with a theory of syntax based on mereological objects.Mereology is the study of part

The MIT Consciousness Club, led by professors Matthias Michel and Earl Miller, explores how neurological activity gives rise to human experience.

AbstractMany empirical studies have found a curvilinear (inverted-U) relationship between knowledge and curiosity, such that curiosity is induced when stimuli are neither unknown nor too familiar. While various theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, no clear link between them have been delineated. In this Perspective, we review seven psychological accounts of the inverted-U relationship between knowledge and curiosity (“the U”) and provide a coherent framework integrating them. According to this framework, the U emerges as a consequence of the imperative to pursue learning progress and thus maximize knowledge. We show that some theories of curiosity address this issue by explicitly stipulating knowledge maximization as the computational objective, and learning-progress maximization as an optimal means of achieving it (i.e., normative theories). Other theories focus on psychological mechanisms or factors that drive curiosity (i.e., process theories). We propose that these process-theoretic mechanisms could also work in a manner that maximizes learning by signaling situations in which some relevant prior knowledge exists, but is incomplete. The implications of this framework for future theoretical work on curiosity and its connections to related phenomena are discussed.

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