Cognition & AI
Let the Wobble Teach
Why kids learn skills from wobbles, pauses, and prediction errors — and what brain replay can teach parents about practice.
Tag: Reinforcement Learning
10 articles
Cognition & AI
Your Kid Is Not Random
Children’s curiosity can look chaotic, but research suggests their exploration follows a learning logic that parents can support without over-controlling.
Cognition & AI
Dopamine Doesn't Care About Your RL Textbook
The brain-runs-on-RL story is elegant, productive, and partially true. But 2025 has four new studies that make the simple version increasingly hard to defend — and the complicated version way more interesting.
Cognition & AI
Nobody Learns Alone
Peer learning isn't a nice pedagogical bonus — it's load-bearing for cognition. New neuroscience shows what the socially interactive brain is actually doing, and why multi-agent AI isn't even close to replicating it.
Embodied Cognition & AI
Robots Grew Grid Cells. Your Brain Had Them First.
A two-year-old builds a spatial map of a playground in minutes. A deep RL robot navigating a virtual maze independently grew the same hexagonal grid-cell structure evolution put in the hippocampus. The convergence isn't coincidence — it's math.
Cognition & AI
Stuck on Yesterday's Rule
A five-year-old adjusting the wrong wheel on a cardboard car for twenty minutes, a toddler reaching for a moved toy in the wrong spot, an AI model locked onto its training distribution — they all share the same problem. Here's what genuine cognitive flexibility actually requires, and why it's one of the hardest things any mind can do.
Embodied Cognition & AI
Rhythm Is a Body Problem
Babies keep time before they can walk. AI generates music by counting tokens. The gap between these two things reveals something fundamental about what rhythm actually is — and why closing it matters.
Embodied Cognition & AI
Transformers Look. Children Pay Attention.
Transformers compute attention over millions of tokens simultaneously. Children pay attention through their bodies, their predictions, their mistakes. The gap between the two reveals something deep about what attention actually is — and why embodied AI keeps failing in kitchens.
Neuroscience & AI
Brains 'Sleep' for Memory. AI Fakes It.
During sleep, your hippocampus runs a selective replay of the day's experiences to wire memories into your neocortex. AI has a pale imitation. Here's how far apart the two actually are.
Neuroscience & AI
The Window Closes: What Critical Periods in Child Development Tell Us About AI's Plasticity Problem
Children have a supercharged window for learning motor skills, language, and movement. Deep neural networks face a strikingly similar problem — and the solutions emerging from neuroscience might hold the key.