Tag Archives: Cognitive science

10Mar/23

Why does music bring back memories? What the science says

Kelly Jakubowski, Durham University

You’re walking down a busy street on your way to work. You pass a busker playing a song you haven’t heard in years. Now suddenly, instead of noticing all the goings on in the city around you, you’re mentally reliving the first time you heard the song. Hearing that piece of music takes you right back to where you were, who you were with and the feelings associated with that memory.

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How your brain decides what to think

Valerie van Mulukom, Coventry University

You’re sitting on the plane, staring out of the window at the clouds and all of a sudden, you think back to how a few months ago, you had a heart-to-heart with a good colleague about the pressure you experience at work. How do thoughts seemingly completely unrelated to the present pop into our heads? Why do we remember certain things and not others? Why does our mind go off on tangents and why do we have daydreams?

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29Jan/23

Deepfakes: faces created by AI now look more real than genuine photos

Manos Tsakiris, Royal Holloway University of London

Even if you think you are good at analysing faces, research shows many people cannot reliably distinguish between photos of real faces and images that have been computer-generated. This is particularly problematic now that computer systems can create realistic-looking photos of people who don’t exist.

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01Jul/22

It’s alive! How belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

OAKLAND, Calif., June 30 (Reuters) – AI chatbot company Replika, which offers customers bespoke avatars that talk and listen to them, says it receives a handful of messages almost every day from users who believe their online friend is sentient.

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