September 1, 2026
Earl K. Miller, Scott L. Brincat, and Jefferson E. Roy of MIT's Picower Institute argue in the Journal of Neuroscience that the standard "circuit" metaphor is incomplete: physical connections store information, but traveling waves of rhythmic activity coordinate millions of neurons and carry out analog computation. They call the mechanism spatiotemporal computing, in which wave interference runs many calculations in parallel, and propose that consciousness arises when those wave patterns grow large enough to unify cortex — a prediction they tie to earlier anesthesia work showing three drugs with different molecular targets all disrupting wave dynamics.
MIT News →August 31, 2026
Caitriona Douglas and colleagues at Dalhousie University used EEG hyperscanning — recording two people at once during a scripted conversation — to test how the N400 lexical frequency effect behaves outside a single-subject lab task. Taking part in the conversation reduced the neural processing normally associated with less frequent words, while a control group that only watched a recorded conversation showed the larger effect. The team also worked out how to run a hyperscanning study on a single EEG system, removing the usual requirement to own two, and built the conversation task on techniques borrowed from improv and theatre.
Cognitive Neuroscience Society →August 30, 2026
In a randomized crossover trial (the HAFTRAP study), 119 adults performed about 12% faster on the Trail Making Test after a month with a HEPA air purifier at home versus a sham unit — a benefit seen only in participants 40 and older, and roughly comparable in size to the cognitive benefits linked to increased exercise.
Scientific Reports →August 25, 2026
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh and the UK Dementia Research Institute found that oligodendrocytes — the brain's myelin-producing cells — become dysfunctional with age and actively contribute to cognitive decline rather than just failing to prevent it. Using the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 (866 participants with cognitive testing from age 70 to 82) plus mouse experiments, they traced the effect to reduced NRF2 protein levels, pointing at existing MS drugs as candidates to repurpose for preserving cognition in aging.
Nature Medicine →August 24, 2026
Madhura Lotlikar and senior author Marc Roig at McGill University kept 54 healthy young adults awake for 30 consecutive hours, then randomly assigned them to a 20-minute moderate-to-vigorous cycling session, a 90-minute nap, or an inactive control condition. Tested on image recognition three days later, both the exercise and nap groups scored about 22% higher than the control group. Brain recordings suggested the two interventions worked through different mechanisms: napping appeared to let the brain recharge for taking in new information, while exercise helped it use remaining cognitive resources more efficiently without reducing fatigue.
McGill University →August 24, 2026
An MIT and Boston University team led by Evelina Fedorenko and Swathi Kiran compared fMRI responses in adults aged 17–39 and 41–80 and found the language network essentially unchanged with age — same topography, same left-lateralization, same selectivity for language over other tasks, and same within-network functional connectivity. The multiple-demand (executive) network in the same participants declined on nearly every measure. Older adults also retained strong sensitivity to linguistic difficulty, arguing against any fundamental change in how they process language.
MIT News →August 24, 2026
Across three studies covering seven datasets and more than 880,000 texts, a University of Southern California team led by Zhivar Sourati found that when large language models polish or rewrite text they keep the core content but homogenize style, reducing writing-complexity variance by a statistically significant 21–50% across datasets and models. The effect amplifies patterns tied to dominant author characteristics and suppresses others, which the authors flag as a problem for any field that reads identity, psychological state, or social context off of language — diagnostics, personalization, and hiring assessment among them.
Nature Human Behaviour →August 20, 2026
Ryssa Moffat, Guillaume Dumas, and Emily S. Cross tracked 31 intergenerational and 30 same-generation pairs (91 younger adults 18–35, 31 older adults 69+, all in Zurich) through a six-week collaborative drawing program, recording fNIRS hyperscanning over bilateral inferior frontal and temporoparietal regions. Same-generation pairs' brain synchrony rose across sessions in theory-of-mind regions, while intergenerational pairs' synchrony fell in the same regions — even though both groups reported growing socially closer. The authors read the split as a prediction effect: familiarity lets intergenerational partners anticipate each other more easily, while younger same-age pairs may sustain higher synchrony by staying less predictable with each other.
PLOS Biology →August 20, 2026
Yingxu Liu, Leon Aksman, and Arthur Toga at USC's Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute analyzed brain scans and cognitive assessments from 459 community-dwelling adults aged 60+ across India. Gray-matter atrophy remained the strongest predictor of cognitive decline, but healthier superficial white matter — the thin layer of short, curved nerve fibers just beneath the cortex — was linked particularly to stronger language performance, including word recognition and verbal fluency. Among people with comparable gray-matter loss, those with healthier superficial white matter showed smaller cognitive deficits, suggesting this local wiring can buffer against gray-matter atrophy's effects.
USC Keck School of Medicine →August 8, 2026
Researchers at Tsinghua University, TU Graz, and Italy's National Research Council, led by Wolfgang Maass, built an AI system that plans using brain-inspired 'cognitive maps' instead of standard deep neural networks — motivated by the brain's roughly 20-watt power budget against the energy cost of current AI. Published in Nature Machine Intelligence, with hardware-implementation collaboration already underway with Intel and a US startup.
Nature Machine Intelligence →August 1, 2026
The Cognitive Science Society's flagship annual meeting returns as a hybrid event this year, with simultaneous Spanish and Portuguese translation on select sessions. Standard registration closes July 1, 2026; see the Events page here for the full date breakdown.
Cognitive Science Society →July 28, 2026
A free, peer-reviewed, continuously growing successor to the print-era MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) — now with over 200 cross-referenced articles, each carrying a DOI and written by researchers in the field. Worth bookmarking as background reading alongside anything on this site.
Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (MIT) →July 24, 2026
The Cognitive Science Society named Herbert H. Clark, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, as the recipient of the twenty-seventh David E. Rumelhart Prize. The society's citation credits Clark with recasting language as a fundamentally collaborative activity — treating speaking and understanding as forms of joint action — and traces that influence through cognitive psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. The prize carries a bronze medal, a certificate, a citation, and $100,000.
Cognitive Science Society →