Cognition

Processes involved in acquiring, retaining, transforming and using information. Cognitive neuroscience investigates how these processes depend on biological mechanisms.

A family of accounts relating perception and action to predictions and incoming information. Explanations require a specified representation, error weighting and learning rule; the general vocabulary alone does not identify a mechanism.

The significance assigned to an event or experience. The same bodily sensation or reminder may have different emotional consequences depending on its meaning, while real-world danger still requires assessment.

Evaluation of coping possibilities, control and available responses. In appraisal theory, evaluating the same event as controllable or uncontrollable can help explain differences in emotion.

Evaluation of whether an event matters to well-being or goals, and whether it involves benefit, harm or threat. The distinction from secondary appraisal concerns evaluative content; it need not imply two consciously experienced, strictly successive stages.

Operations that select, transform, retain or use information. A definition broad enough to include all learning does not, by itself, identify a mechanism distinguishing one clinical disorder from another.

Improvement on a problem after an interval spent away from it. A causal effect of an interval condition does not by itself identify which mental events during that interval produced the improvement.

Drawing a conclusion after comparatively limited evidence under a specified task. A beads task measures information sampling under particular demands, not a direct readout of every real-world belief process.

An information-sampling task in which observations from a source are used to infer which source generated them. Decisions about when to stop sampling can investigate reasoning tendencies, with comprehension and task incentives affecting interpretation.

Awareness of oneself as the subject of an event located in personal subjective time. In Endel Tulving's account it characterizes episodic memory, as distinct from knowing facts without reliving their acquisition. An operational test of event information is not automatically a test of this phenomenology.^[ref]