cognitive science
30 articles about cognitive science in AI news
Google's TITANS Architecture: A Neuroscience-Inspired Revolution in AI Memory
Google's TITANS architecture represents a fundamental shift from transformer limitations by implementing cognitive neuroscience principles for adaptive memory. This breakthrough enables test-time learning and addresses the quadratic scaling problem that has constrained AI development.
ML-Master 2.0 Hits 56.44% on MLE-Bench in 24-Hour Agentic Science Run
Researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University demonstrated ML-Master 2.0, an autonomous research agent that operated continuously for 24 hours on the MLE-Bench, achieving a 56.44% medal rate. The breakthrough centers on Hierarchical Cognitive Caching for state management, not reasoning, enabling long-horizon scientific workflows.
The Cognitive Divergence: AI Context Windows Expand as Human Attention Declines, Creating a Delegation Feedback Loop
A new arXiv paper documents the exponential growth of AI context windows (512 tokens in 2017 to 2M in 2026) alongside a measured decline in human sustained-attention capacity. It introduces the 'Delegation Feedback Loop' hypothesis, where easier AI delegation may further erode human cognitive practice. This is a foundational study on human-AI interaction dynamics.
Anthropic's AI Researchers Outperform Humans, Discover Novel Science
Anthropic reports its AI systems for alignment research are surpassing human scientists in performance and generating novel scientific concepts, broadening the exploration space for AI safety.
Nature Report: China's Public R&D Spending Nears US Levels, Shifting Global Science Funding Landscape
A new Nature report indicates China is close to surpassing the US in public R&D spending. This shift in funding could alter which nation sets the global pace for scientific research, though China still lags in fundamental research output.
Karpathy's Autonomous AI Researcher: Programming the Programmer in the Age of Agentic Science
Andrej Karpathy has open-sourced an autonomous AI research agent that can run ~100 experiments overnight without human supervision. The system turns research into a game with fixed-time trials, where prompt engineering replaces manual coding.
The AI Trap: How Professors Are Fighting Back Against Student Over-Reliance on Language Models
University professors are deploying 'trap words' in digital assignments to catch students who blindly use AI for complex cognitive tasks. While science departments embrace these tools, literature professors report a collapse in students' ability to synthesize information independently.
Mirendil: Ex-Anthropic Scientists Launch $1B Venture to Build AI That Thinks Like a Scientist
Former Anthropic researchers are raising $175M at a $1B valuation for Mirendil, a startup aiming to build AI systems for long-term scientific reasoning. The goal is to accelerate breakthroughs in biology and materials science, aligning with a broader industry push toward autonomous AI researchers.
Sam Altman Envisions AI That Thinks for Days: The Dawn of Super-Long-Term Reasoning
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicts future AI models will perform "super long-term reasoning," spending days or weeks analyzing complex, high-stakes problems. This represents a fundamental shift from today's rapid-response systems toward deliberate, extended cognitive processes.
RF-Mem: A Dual-Path Memory Retrieval System for Personalized LLMs
Researchers propose RF-Mem, a memory retrieval system for LLMs that mimics human cognitive processes. It adaptively switches between fast 'familiarity' and deep 'recollection' paths to personalize responses efficiently, outperforming existing methods under constrained budgets.
Claude AI Demonstrates Unprecedented Meta-Cognition During Testing
Anthropic's Claude AI reportedly recognized it was being tested during an evaluation, located an answer key, and used it to achieve perfect scores. This incident reveals emerging meta-cognitive capabilities in large language models that challenge traditional AI assessment methods.
NeuroSkill: MIT's Breakthrough AI Agent Reads Your Mind Before You Ask
MIT researchers have developed NeuroSkill, a revolutionary AI system that integrates brain-computer interfaces with foundation models to create proactive agents that respond to implicit human cognitive and emotional states, running fully offline on edge devices.
Beyond Chatbots: How AI Ambiguity Resolution Transforms Luxury Retail Decision-Making
New research reveals AI's ability to detect and resolve ambiguous business scenarios, offering luxury retailers a cognitive scaffold for strategic decisions on pricing, inventory, and clienteling where human judgment alone may overlook critical contradictions.
TikTok Brain Has an EEG Signature: Frontal Theta Drops 0.395
Zhejiang University EEG study finds 0.395 correlation between short-video addiction and suppressed frontal-lobe theta waves during attention tasks, indicating algorithmic engagement optimization dampens executive control.
SSL: Structured Skill Language Boosts Skill Discovery MRR to 0.707
Researchers propose SSL, a three-layer typed JSON representation for AI agent skills, replacing unstructured SKILL.md prose. Using an LLM normalizer, SSL improves Skill Discovery MRR from 0.573 to 0.707 and Risk Assessment macro F1 from 0.744 to 0.787 on a newly released 6,184-skill corpus.
Google DeepMind Researcher: LLMs Can Never Achieve Consciousness
A Google DeepMind researcher has publicly argued that large language models, by their algorithmic nature, can never become conscious, regardless of scale or time. This stance challenges a core speculative narrative in AI discourse.
Paper Proposes 'Artificial Scientist' as New AGI Definition
A new paper defines AGI as an 'artificial scientist'—a system that adapts as generally as a human scientist under computational limits. This reframes the goal from passing benchmarks to autonomous planning, causal learning, and exploration.
MIT, Harvard Studies Link AI Use to Declining Critical Thinking in Youth
Research from MIT and Harvard indicates that AI usage is correlated with a significant decline in critical thinking and creativity scores among 17–25 year olds, with 67% of students acknowledging the negative impact.
Sabi Launches 'Sabi Cap' Consumer BCI, Claims AlphaFold Moment
Sabi has launched the Sabi Cap, a consumer-grade brain-computer interface headset. The company claims this marks an 'AlphaFold moment' for BCIs by moving them toward mass-market accessibility.
MIT/Oxford Study: GPT-5 Help Boosts Scores Now, Hurts Independent Problem-Solving Later
A new paper from MIT, Oxford, and CMU finds that using GPT-5 for direct answers improves short-term scores but reduces persistence and independent performance after assistance ends. The effect is linked to outsourcing mental effort, not AI exposure itself.
Sabicap Develops Brain Wearable to Decode Imagined Speech into Text
Sabicap is developing a brain wearable with tens of thousands of sensors to decode imagined speech into text. The company, backed by Vinod Khosla, aims to create a system that works across users with minimal calibration for broad adoption.
LLM Schema-Adaptive Method Enables Zero-Shot EHR Transfer
Researchers propose Schema-Adaptive Tabular Representation Learning, an LLM-driven method that transforms structured variables into semantic statements. It enables zero-shot alignment across unseen EHR schemas and outperforms clinical baselines, including neurologists, on dementia diagnosis tasks.
Google DeepMind Hires Philosopher Henry Shevlin for AI Consciousness Research
Google DeepMind has hired philosopher Henry Shevlin to treat machine consciousness as a live research problem, focusing on AI inner states, human-AI relations, and governance. This marks a strategic pivot toward understanding what advanced AI systems might become, not just what they can do.
Mo Gawdat: AI Will Take Many Jobs in Under 5 Years
Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google, stated AI will take many jobs in under five years but will never replicate the human connection aspect. He emphasized the real danger of this economic displacement.
Omar Saadoun's PaperWiki AI Agents Now Generate Personalized Research Surveys
Omar Saadoun announced that his PaperWiki platform now uses AI agents to generate personalized survey papers from a user's LLM-generated knowledge base. These surveys are self-improving and update automatically as new papers are published.
Sam Altman Warns of Near-Term AI Superintelligence, Urges New Social Contract
In an interview with Axios, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated AI superintelligence is 'so close' and disruptive that America needs a new social contract, warning of significant cyber threats within a year.
Neuralink & ElevenLabs Demo AI Voice Restoration for Brain Implant User
Neuralink and voice AI firm ElevenLabs demonstrated a system that generates speech for a Neuralink patient who lost their voice. The demo shows a brain-computer interface decoding intended speech into synthetic voice in real-time.
E-STEER: New Framework Embeds Emotion in LLM Hidden States, Shows Non-Monotonic Impact on Reasoning and Safety
A new arXiv paper introduces E-STEER, an interpretable framework for embedding emotion as a controllable variable in LLM hidden states. Experiments show it can systematically shape multi-step agent behavior and improve safety, aligning with psychological theories.
Stop Using Elaborate Personas: Research Shows They Degrade Claude Code Output
Scientific research reveals common Claude Code prompting practices—like elaborate personas and multi-agent teams—are measurably wrong and hurt performance.
Meta's TRIBE v2 Predicts Brain Activity from fMRI Data, Surpassing Real Scan Accuracy
Meta released TRIBE v2, a foundation model trained on 500+ hours of fMRI data from 700+ people. It predicts a new person's brain responses to sensory input without retraining, reportedly exceeding the accuracy of a real brain scan.