Latest news with #cognitiveScientists
National Post
31-07-2025
- Science
- National Post
Paul W. Bennett: AI isn't revolutionizing learning. It's mimicking original thought
Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT have entered classrooms, universities, and homework routines with astonishing speed and little attention to the long-term consequences. A recent Canadian news report, aired on CBC's The National, also revealed that teachers have mostly been left to fend for themselves. Article content The current infatuation with AI is part of a recurrent pattern, but the latest educational fad is far more fundamental in its impact on teaching and learning in classrooms. It's time to ask: Are these tools eating away at our brain power and leading schools astray? Article content Article content Article content Technology evangelists and educators espousing '21st century learning' tout its ability to save time, individualize instruction, and increase access to information. But little has been done to assess its effects on students' ability to think independently, write clearly, and engage with knowledge deeply. Article content Article content What's encouraging is the fact that leading cognitive scientists, evidence-based researchers, and experienced frontline teachers are beginning to right the balance. Article content There is mounting evidence that the emergence of ChatGPT and similar AI tools are short-circuiting deeper learning, eroding critical thinking capacities, and undermining the teaching of writing. Our brains, it turns out, need knowledge to function at their best. Article content Generative AI is proving to be a large learning model which encourages passivity in learners. Leading cognitive scientist, Barbara Oakley, an American expert on learning how to learn, warns that ' mental effort is essential to build real understanding.' Meaningful learning, according to Oakley, is built through deliberate practice, cognitive struggle, and retrieval of knowledge — all processes undermined when students delegate intellectual labour to AI tools. Article content Article content Bypassing the productive discomfort associated with writing and problem-solving, students risk becoming consumers of content rather than producers of thought. The process of wrestling with an argument, organizing one's thoughts, and finding the right words is foundational to critical thinking. Article content Article content Generative AI, however, short-circuits this developmental trajectory by offering polished outputs without much heavy lifting. If students become accustomed to outsourcing the most demanding aspects of thinking and writing, known as cognitive offloading, they lose the capacity to do it themselves. Article content American education commentator, Natalie Wexler, author of The Knowledge Gap, sees AI as the latest educational trend that emphasizes skills over content, inhibiting our capacity to grasp and understand knowledge in context. True critical thinking, she argues, cannot be taught in isolation from a deep base of knowledge. In her view, students need a well-stocked mental library of facts, concepts, and contexts to think critically and write effectively. Generative AI, by providing surface-level responses to prompts, may reinforce the illusion that knowledge is readily available and easily synthesized, even when it lacks depth or coherence. Students may come to view knowledge acquisition as unnecessary, assuming that AI can fill in the gaps. This undermines both the cognitive effort required to develop coherent explanations and the long-term retention that underpins higher-order thinking and genuine problem-solving.
National Post
21-06-2025
- Science
- National Post
What we know about yawning, from why we do it to why it's contagious
Yawning is strange. Article content It's not obviously just mechanical, like a burp to release gas pressure, or just psychological, like a yelp to express fear or excitement. A yawn is more like a sneeze or a hiccup, an involuntary breath event that is sometimes more or less resistible. Article content Article content But what is really strange, almost unique among human behaviours, is that yawning is contagious. Article content New research on chimpanzees by a British team of cognitive scientists shows contagious yawning is not only common in other species, and can happen between species, but that it can also be induced in chimps by an obviously artificial humanoid robot, an android 'agent' that is just a creepy looking disembodied head and shoulders, and which doesn't even breathe, but which can still give a believable facsimile of a yawn. Article content Article content The paper, published this month in Nature Scientific Reports, details an experiment in which the chimps were shown three behaviours by the android: a full wide-mouth yawn, a more moderate gaping mouth, and a closed mouth. Article content 'The results showed that adult chimpanzees exhibited across-agent yawn contagion, with a graded response: the highest contagion occurred when the android displayed a fully wide-open mouth (Yawn condition), a reduced response when the mouth was partially opened (Gape condition), and no contagion when the android's mouth was closed,' the paper says. Article content Article content And the chimps did not only yawn in response to the yawning robot. They also 'engaged in behaviours associated with drowsiness,' basically by preparing a comfortable place to lie down. Article content Article content 'This suggests that yawning by an unfamiliar model may act as a contextual cue for rest, rather than merely triggering a motor resonance response,' the paper says. Article content Diverse species exhibit contagious yawning, certainly mammals like dogs and cats, but even fish, whose respiratory system shares evolutionary origins with our own. Article content Most vertebrates yawn, but those that are known to yawn contagiously are usually pack animals, somehow social. This suggests the evolutionary purpose of the yawn is at least partly at the level of the group, not just the individual. A sneeze just tries to blast stuff out of your nose, a burp just lets gas out of your belly, but a yawn means something to other people. Article content Not always, of course, Yawning might, for example, help cool the brain for optimal performance, as one theory holds. But yawning also involves empathy, as its contagious aspect shows. It is a social phenomenon, and catching, like laughter. Article content 'What I find strange is that if we see someone walking, we don't an feel urge to walk. But with yawning, we do,' said Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni, a research fellow in social and cognitive neuroscience at City St. George's University of London in the U.K., in an interview.
