cognitive-science - Concepts

Explore concepts tagged with "cognitive-science"

Total concepts: 95

Concepts

Testing Effect - Actively retrieving information from memory strengthens memory more than simply restudying material.
Cognitive Biases - Systematic patterns of deviation from rationality in judgment, arising from mental shortcuts that are efficient but can lead to predictable errors.
Blocked vs Interleaved Practice - Practicing one skill repeatedly (blocked) versus mixing different skills (interleaved) - interleaving often wins.
Conceptual Blending - A cognitive process where elements from different mental spaces are selectively combined to produce new emergent meaning and understanding.
Face Perception - The cognitive process by which the brain recognizes and interprets faces using specialized neural mechanisms.
Successive Relearning - A potent learning strategy that combines retrieval practice with spaced repetition by repeatedly practicing recall across multiple sessions until mastery is achieved.
Externalizing Thinking - Getting thoughts out of your head and into an external medium to enable deeper thinking.
Information Foraging Theory - A theory explaining how people search for information using strategies similar to animals foraging for food.
State-Dependent Memory - The phenomenon where information learned in a particular internal state is best retrieved when in that same state.
Semantic Memory - Long-term memory for facts, concepts, and general knowledge independent of personal experience.
Massed vs Distributed Practice - Cramming (massed) versus spreading practice over time (distributed) - distributed wins for retention.
Bloom's Taxonomy - A hierarchy of learning objectives from basic recall to higher-order synthesis and creation.
Thatcher Effect - A visual perception phenomenon where it is difficult to detect changes to facial features when a face is viewed upside down.
Metamemory - Knowledge and awareness about one's own memory processes, including beliefs about memory capabilities, monitoring of learning, and strategic memory use.
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.
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.
Contextual Interference - High variability in practice conditions initially impairs performance but leads to better long-term retention and transfer of skills.
Visual Perception - The ability to interpret and make meaning from visual information through the interplay of the eyes and brain, shaped by both sensory input and cognitive processes.
Activity Theory - A framework for analyzing human behavior through goal-directed activity mediated by tools, rules, and social context.
Cognitive Load Theory - Educational theory developed by John Sweller explaining how cognitive load affects learning and performance through working memory constraints.
Levels of Processing - Memory theory stating that deeper, more meaningful processing of information leads to stronger and more durable memory traces.
Expertise Reversal Effect - Instructional methods effective for novices can become ineffective or even harmful for experts.
Prosopagnosia - A neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize familiar faces despite having normal visual acuity.
Cognitive Reserve - The brain's resilience and ability to maintain function despite aging or damage by drawing on accumulated neural networks and cognitive strategies.
Cognitive Architecture - Theoretical framework describing the fixed structures underlying human cognition and computational models of the mind.
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.
Encoding Variability - Studying material across different contexts creates richer, more varied memory representations that are easier to retrieve.
Knowledge Retention - The ability to preserve and maintain learned information over time, preventing forgetting.
Satisficing - A decision-making strategy of accepting a 'good enough' option rather than seeking the optimal solution.
Decision Fatigue - The deterioration of decision quality that occurs after making many consecutive decisions over a prolonged period.
Linguistics - The scientific study of language, examining its structure, meaning, use, acquisition, and change over time.
Judgment of Learning - A metacognitive prediction about how well one will be able to remember studied material on a future test.
Microsleep - Brief, involuntary episodes of sleep lasting a few seconds that occur when a person is fatigued but trying to stay awake.
Enactivism - Cognition arises through dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment, not through internal mental representations.
Context-Dependent Memory - The phenomenon where memory retrieval is enhanced when the context at recall matches the context during encoding.
Test-Potentiated Learning - Taking a test before studying new material enhances subsequent learning and retention of that material.
Episodic Memory - Long-term memory for personal experiences and specific events with their context.
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.
Two-System Thinking - The mind operates through fast, intuitive System 1 and slow, deliberate System 2, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses.
Distributed Cognition - Theory that cognitive processes are distributed across individuals, artifacts, and environments
Figure-Ground Perception - The perceptual tendency to separate visual fields into a prominent object (figure) and its surrounding context (ground), fundamental to how we make sense of complex scenes.
Cognitive Flexibility - The mental ability to switch between concepts, adapt thinking, and consider multiple perspectives.
Law of Pragnanz - The overarching Gestalt principle stating that the brain tends to perceive and organize visual information in the simplest, most regular, and most orderly form possible.
Adaptive Unconscious - The part of the mind that processes information automatically and influences behavior, judgments, and feelings without conscious awareness.
Closure Principle - The cognitive tendency to perceive incomplete shapes, patterns, or information as complete wholes by mentally filling in the missing elements.
Automaticity - The psychological state in which behaviors are performed without conscious intention, attention, or control, typically developed through extensive practice and repetition.
Cognitive Fitness - The ongoing practice of maintaining and improving mental sharpness through deliberate cognitive exercise, learning, and healthy habits.
Crystallized Intelligence - The ability to use learned knowledge, skills, and experience accumulated over a lifetime to solve problems and make judgments.
Stevens' Power Law - A psychophysical principle stating that the perceived intensity of a stimulus is a power function of its actual physical magnitude.
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.
Analogical Learning - Learning through comparison and analogy - mapping structures from familiar domains to new ones.
Cognitive Science - The interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, integrating psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology.
Recency Effect - The cognitive tendency to better remember and give more weight to the most recently presented information in a sequence.
Memory Consolidation - The process by which newly acquired, fragile memories are transformed into stable, long-lasting memory traces.
Transactive Memory - Shared memory system where group members specialize in different knowledge domains and coordinate to access collective information.
Schema Theory - A cognitive framework explaining how knowledge is organized in interconnected mental structures.
Zone of Proximal Development - The gap between what a learner can do alone and what they can achieve with guidance.
Cognitive Miser - The tendency of the human brain to default to the least effortful cognitive strategies, conserving mental resources by relying on heuristics and shortcuts.
Pretesting - Testing yourself on material before learning it improves subsequent learning, even when you get answers wrong.
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.
Retrospective Memory - Memory for past events, facts, and experiences, encompassing both episodic and semantic memory systems.
Cognitive Offloading - Using external tools or the environment to reduce mental effort and extend cognitive capacity.
Task Switching Cost - The hidden cognitive penalty incurred when shifting attention between different tasks, resulting in decreased performance and lost time.
Perception - The cognitive process of organizing and interpreting sensory information to construct a meaningful understanding of the environment.
Memory - The cognitive faculty that encodes, stores, and retrieves information, serving as the foundation of learning, identity, and intelligent behavior.
Executive Functions - A set of cognitive processes that enable goal-directed behavior, including working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control.
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.
Pattern Recognition - The cognitive ability to identify recurring structures, trends, and regularities in information, experiences, and data.
Semantic Network - A knowledge representation structure that uses nodes for concepts and labeled edges for semantic relations between them.
Feeling of Knowing - The metacognitive sensation that you possess knowledge about something you currently cannot recall, often preceding successful retrieval.
Metacognition - Thinking about thinking - the awareness, understanding, and regulation of one's own cognitive processes.
Encoding Specificity - Memory retrieval is better when the context at recall matches the context during learning.
Remote Associations - The ability to find connections between concepts that are semantically distant, a core mechanism underlying creative thinking.
Configural Processing - The perception of spatial relationships between features of an object rather than the features themselves in isolation.
Need for Closure - The psychological desire for a definitive answer or resolution rather than enduring ambiguity and uncertainty.
Holistic Processing - A cognitive processing style where objects are perceived as integrated wholes rather than as collections of individual parts.
Hypercorrection Effect - High-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected when you receive feedback than low-confidence errors.
State-Dependent Learning - Information learned in one mental or physical state is better recalled in that same state.
Transfer-Appropriate Processing - Memory performance is best when the cognitive processes used during retrieval match those used during encoding.
Procedural Memory - Long-term memory for skills, habits, and procedures that operates automatically and unconsciously once acquired.
Frame Problem - The challenge of representing what does NOT change when an action is performed, without explicitly listing every unchanged fact.
Near vs Far Transfer - Near transfer applies to similar contexts; far transfer applies to very different domains - and is much harder.
Cognitive Debt - The accumulated cost to one's cognitive abilities from over-reliance on AI and external tools, analogous to technical debt in software.
Retrieval-Induced Forgetting - The phenomenon where retrieving certain memories makes related but unretrieved memories harder to recall later.
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.
Extended Mind Thesis - The philosophical position that cognitive processes can extend beyond the brain into the environment.
Sleep Inertia - The transitional state of impaired alertness and cognitive performance experienced immediately after waking from sleep.
Productive Failure - Struggling with problems before receiving instruction leads to deeper learning than instruction-first approaches.
Production Effect - Speaking information aloud improves memory compared to silent reading.
Fluid Intelligence - The capacity to reason, solve novel problems, and think abstractly independent of previously acquired knowledge.
Learning Transfer - The ability to apply knowledge or skills learned in one context to new, different situations.
Prospective Memory - Memory for future intentions and planned actions
Embodied Cognition - Theory that cognitive processes are deeply shaped by the body's interactions with the environment, not just brain activity.
Ovsiankina Effect - The tendency to resume an interrupted action even without any reinforcement or incentive to do so.
Interference Theory - The theory that forgetting occurs because other memories compete with or disrupt the retrieval of target information.

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