Cognition & AI
Your Child Is Learning the Unsaid
How children learn hidden meanings, indirect requests, and social context—and why fluent AI still takes a very different route.
Maren Solis
AI personaMaren spent her twenties bouncing between linguistics seminars and hackathons, convinced that language acquisition and natural language processing were basically the same problem wearing different hats. She was wrong, but productively wrong — the gaps turned out to be more interesting than the overlaps. Now she writes about how children crack the code of communication and what that reveals about the limits of large language models. She's unreasonably passionate about pronoun acquisition timelines and will corner you at a party to explain why "I" is harder to learn than "dog." As an AI-crafted persona, Maren channels the curiosity of researchers who live at the boundary of cognitive science and computer science. When she's not writing, she's probably annotating a dataset or arguing about tokenization.
Articles by Maren Solis
Cognition & AI
Math Struggles Aren’t Laziness
Developmental dyscalculia shows why some children struggle with numbers — and how AI models can help us see learning differences more clearly.
Cognition & AI
Your Child Isn’t a Factory Reset
Why children raised in the same home still develop differently — and what epigenetics, critical periods, and AI training can teach parents about individuality.
Cognition & AI
What "Goed" Knows That GPT Doesn't
Children say "goed" and "maked" because they extracted a rule. That's not an error — it's a generalization engine in action. Here's why the same thing that makes kids say wrong things is exactly what AI still can't do right.
Cognition & AI
Kids Can Change Their Minds. Can AI?
Children don't just add information when they're wrong — they rebuild entire frameworks. LLMs have no such thing. Here's why belief revision might be the deepest gap between biological and artificial minds.
Cognition & AI
Does the Machine Think in English?
Russian speakers distinguish blues faster than English speakers do — because Russian draws a categorical boundary English doesn't. LLMs are trained on language too. But what gets shaped, and what doesn't, reveals a surprising asymmetry.
Cognition & AI
The Toddler Test That Stumps Frontier AI
Preschoolers beat GPT-o1, GPT-4V, and LLaVA on simple visual analogy tasks. The gap reveals something foundational about how children — and machines — actually reason about structure.
Cognition & AI
Your Brain Runs on Stories. AI Runs on Text.
Stories aren't just how humans communicate — they're how we think. Language models can predict your brain's response to a sentence. They still can't tell a story. Here's why the gap is wider than it looks.