Pushing the boundaries of mental tools: Frank Mollica and the Complex Human Data Hub

Humans have many goals from basic survival needs to home-ownership and gaining TikTok fame. While evolution has optimised solutions for some fundamental goals, like vision, short-term goals arising from fast-changing environments require culturally evolved solutions. This means creating, teaching and communicating effective mental tools like language, maths and cooking.

Dr Frank Mollica, a researcher at the Complex Human Data Hub, describes his work as “creating computational models to understand how efficiency constraints shape the kinds of mental tools people use, both individually and across cultures.” He studies how we develop, share and use those mental tools and aims to apply these insights to improve education and communication technologies.

Frank is driven by the desire to translate complicated content for new audiences. He lives by computer scientist Professor Edsger W. Dikstra’s golden rules for successful scientific research which dictate that you should “work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities” to push the boundary forward. Expanding on his overall motivation, Frank says “my research tries to formalize problems, insights and theories in cognitive science so that we can better evaluate them and translate knowledge across the disciplines of cognitive science and into applications to improve daily life.”

Frank’s research group undertakes a large variety of interdisciplinary projects. These include investigating the role of storytelling in transmitting crucial information for human survival, examining why certain linguistic distinctions are more common across some languages than others and a project that investigates how people choose mathematical problem-solving strategies and how to teach effective strategy selection.

One study explores why people tend to overuse colour words in language, even when unnecessary for identification. Through experiments and computational modelling, researchers seek to determine if colour is special compared to other properties with implications for designing technological solutions for people with impaired vision. Another study seeks to understand and define semi-productive language, which falls between fully productive combinations and fixed idioms, to devise teaching materials for second-language learners.

Explaining one of his projects, Frank says, “Compared to other animals, human infants are useless. Instead of developing longer in the womb, human babies develop in the world where they have rich experiences. If we don’t have these experiences early in development, we can fail to learn important cognitive tools like language and some kinds of perception.” The project seeks to understand how the order of these early experiences affects the critical period for learning cognitive functions.

Frank also conducts research that examines why “legalese” remains communicatively inefficient despite the general efficiency of language. Through behavioural experiments and corpus analyses, the project investigates the institutional, cognitive and historical factors shaping modern legal codes, aiming to design policy to fix it.

The interdisciplinary approach to Frank’s research is one of its most exciting aspects. He enthuses, “I enjoy working with abstract computational frameworks, which means that I can apply these tools on very different topics. Collaborating with experts in a variety of fields allows my team to approach problems from several angles at once and share insights across topics.” Frank’s day might start with classicists parsing Hammurabi’s code and end with coding experiments about material (metal/wood) perception. This diversity keeps his work engaging and unpredictable, leading him to conclude, “At this point, I’m convinced everything may actually be cake.”