Playing this Minecraft game hints at how we learn in real life

Even in a blocky world with zombified piglin chicken jockeys, human ingenuity still stands out.

A Minecraft video game tweaked by scientists revealed clues about what makes people such good learners. The results, published April 25 in Nature Communications, suggest that people who change strategies at opportune moments come out on top.

“The main thing where we’re really interested in is, ‘What makes human social learning so special?’” says Charley Wu, a cognitive scientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Many animals learn from one another, but there’s something kind of fundamentally different about the way that we humans do it.”