PsyPost reports:

New research provides evidence that while advanced artificial intelligence models process language with remarkable skill, they struggle significantly with tasks requiring the kind of sustained focus and conflict resolution seen in human attention.

The study, published in PNAS Nexus, indicates that as cognitive demands increase, these programs experience a complete collapse in their ability to override automatic responses. The findings suggest that artificial intelligence systems currently lack the fundamental executive control necessary for developing true artificial general intelligence.

To understand these findings, it helps to look at how modern artificial intelligence works. Programs like ChatGPT rely on a framework called a transformer architecture. This system uses a specialized attention mechanism that allows the model to assign weight to different parts of a text, predicting which words should come next based on statistical patterns.

Suketu Patel is a doctoral candidate in comparative and cognitive psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Patel and his colleagues conducted this research in the laboratory of Jin Fan at Queens College, CUNY. He noted that the initial public reception of modern language models inspired the research team to investigate the software’s true cognitive capabilities. [Continue reading…]