cognitive-science - Concepts

Explore concepts tagged with "cognitive-science"

Total concepts: 71

Concepts

Theory of Multiple Intelligences - Howard Gardner's theory proposing that intelligence is not a single general ability but consists of multiple distinct modalities including linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic intelligences.
Perception - The cognitive process of organizing and interpreting sensory information to construct a meaningful understanding of the environment.
Episodic Memory - Long-term memory for personal experiences and specific events with their context.
Activity Theory - A framework for analyzing human behavior through goal-directed activity mediated by tools, rules, and social context.
Bloom's Taxonomy - A hierarchy of learning objectives from basic recall to higher-order synthesis and creation.
Retrospective Memory - Memory for past events, facts, and experiences, encompassing both episodic and semantic memory systems.
Context-Dependent Memory - The phenomenon where memory retrieval is enhanced when the context at recall matches the context during encoding.
Testing Effect - Actively retrieving information from memory strengthens memory more than simply restudying material.
Linguistics - The scientific study of language, examining its structure, meaning, use, acquisition, and change over time.
Metacognition - Thinking about thinking - the awareness, understanding, and regulation of one's own cognitive processes.
Cognitive Offloading - Using external tools or the environment to reduce mental effort and extend cognitive capacity.
Near vs Far Transfer - Near transfer applies to similar contexts; far transfer applies to very different domains - and is much harder.
Face Perception - The cognitive process by which the brain recognizes and interprets faces using specialized neural mechanisms.
Cognitive Debt - The accumulated cost to one's cognitive abilities from over-reliance on AI and external tools, analogous to technical debt in software.
Satisficing - A decision-making strategy of accepting a 'good enough' option rather than seeking the optimal solution.
Stevens' Power Law - A psychophysical principle stating that the perceived intensity of a stimulus is a power function of its actual physical magnitude.
Pretesting - Testing yourself on material before learning it improves subsequent learning, even when you get answers wrong.
Thatcher Effect - A visual perception phenomenon where it is difficult to detect changes to facial features when a face is viewed upside down.
Production Effect - Speaking information aloud improves memory compared to silent reading.
Retrieval-Induced Forgetting - The phenomenon where retrieving certain memories makes related but unretrieved memories harder to recall later.
Knowledge Retention - The ability to preserve and maintain learned information over time, preventing forgetting.
Cognitive Flexibility - The mental ability to switch between concepts, adapt thinking, and consider multiple perspectives.
Decision Fatigue - The deterioration of decision quality that occurs after making many consecutive decisions over a prolonged period.
Transactive Memory - Shared memory system where group members specialize in different knowledge domains and coordinate to access collective information.
Cognitive Revolution - The 1950s-1960s intellectual movement that shifted psychology from behaviorism to the scientific study of internal mental processes like attention, memory, reasoning, and language.
State-Dependent Learning - Information learned in one mental or physical state is better recalled in that same state.
Holistic Processing - A cognitive processing style where objects are perceived as integrated wholes rather than as collections of individual parts.
Levels of Processing - Memory theory stating that deeper, more meaningful processing of information leads to stronger and more durable memory traces.
Metamemory - Knowledge and awareness about one's own memory processes, including beliefs about memory capabilities, monitoring of learning, and strategic memory use.
Pattern Recognition - The cognitive ability to identify recurring structures, trends, and regularities in information, experiences, and data.
Configural Processing - The perception of spatial relationships between features of an object rather than the features themselves in isolation.
Memory Consolidation - The process by which newly acquired, fragile memories are transformed into stable, long-lasting memory traces.
Prospective Memory - Memory for future intentions and planned actions
Cognitive Science - The interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, integrating psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology.
Decision Making - The cognitive process of selecting a course of action from multiple alternatives by identifying options, evaluating consequences, and choosing based on preferences or goals.
Task Switching Cost - The hidden cognitive penalty incurred when shifting attention between different tasks, resulting in decreased performance and lost time.
Semantic Memory - Long-term memory for facts, concepts, and general knowledge independent of personal experience.
Embodied Cognition - Theory that cognitive processes are deeply shaped by the body's interactions with the environment, not just brain activity.
Executive Functions - A set of cognitive processes that enable goal-directed behavior, including working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control.
Extended Mind Thesis - The philosophical position that cognitive processes can extend beyond the brain into the environment.
Zone of Proximal Development - The gap between what a learner can do alone and what they can achieve with guidance.
Cognitive Load Theory - Educational theory developed by John Sweller explaining how cognitive load affects learning and performance through working memory constraints.
Connectionism - Connectionism is a cognitive science approach that models mental processes using artificial neural networks of simple interconnected units processing information in parallel through weighted connections.
Cognitive Biases - Systematic patterns of deviation from rationality in judgment, arising from mental shortcuts that are efficient but can lead to predictable errors.
Distributed Cognition - Theory that cognitive processes are distributed across individuals, artifacts, and environments
Analogical Learning - Learning through comparison and analogy - mapping structures from familiar domains to new ones.
Memory - The cognitive faculty that encodes, stores, and retrieves information, serving as the foundation of learning, identity, and intelligent behavior.
State-Dependent Memory - The phenomenon where information learned in a particular internal state is best retrieved when in that same state.
Automaticity - The psychological state in which behaviors are performed without conscious intention, attention, or control, typically developed through extensive practice and repetition.
Expertise Reversal Effect - Instructional methods effective for novices can become ineffective or even harmful for experts.
Schema Theory - A cognitive framework explaining how knowledge is organized in interconnected mental structures.
Blocked vs Interleaved Practice - Practicing one skill repeatedly (blocked) versus mixing different skills (interleaved) - interleaving often wins.
Externalizing Thinking - Getting thoughts out of your head and into an external medium to enable deeper thinking.
Prosopagnosia - A neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize familiar faces despite having normal visual acuity.
Information Foraging Theory - A theory explaining how people search for information using strategies similar to animals foraging for food.
Adaptive Unconscious - The part of the mind that processes information automatically and influences behavior, judgments, and feelings without conscious awareness.
Procedural Memory - Long-term memory for skills, habits, and procedures that operates automatically and unconsciously once acquired.
Intentionality - The property of mental states by which they are 'about' or 'directed toward' something, considered by some philosophers to be the defining mark of the mental.
Frame Problem - The challenge of representing what does NOT change when an action is performed, without explicitly listing every unchanged fact.
Enactivism - Cognition arises through dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment, not through internal mental representations.
Interference Theory - The theory that forgetting occurs because other memories compete with or disrupt the retrieval of target information.
Global Workspace Theory - A cognitive theory of consciousness proposing that conscious awareness arises when information is broadcast from a global workspace to multiple specialized brain systems simultaneously.
Cognitive Architecture - Theoretical framework describing the fixed structures underlying human cognition and computational models of the mind.
Productive Failure - Struggling with problems before receiving instruction leads to deeper learning than instruction-first approaches.
Encoding Specificity - Memory retrieval is better when the context at recall matches the context during learning.
Massed vs Distributed Practice - Cramming (massed) versus spreading practice over time (distributed) - distributed wins for retention.
Learning Transfer - The ability to apply knowledge or skills learned in one context to new, different situations.
Universal Grammar - Noam Chomsky's theory that humans are born with an innate language faculty containing a set of grammatical principles hard-wired into the brain.
Gestalt Psychology - A psychological approach emphasizing that humans perceive whole patterns and configurations rather than individual components, summarized by the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Two-System Thinking - The mind operates through fast, intuitive System 1 and slow, deliberate System 2, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses.
Hypercorrection Effect - High-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected when you receive feedback than low-confidence errors.

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