Cognitive psychology

The study of how information is acquired, represented and used in tasks such as remembering, understanding and reasoning. Behavioral experiments constrain proposed processes; a plausible explanation must predict performance and errors, not merely name an internal faculty.

Representation and processing of numerical information. Numerical cognition includes exact symbolic skills and nonsymbolic quantity processing; an association between them does not show that training one necessarily improves every other skill.

Rapid exact recognition of a small quantity without serial counting. Subitizing small collections does not imply direct exact representation of arbitrarily large numbers or knowledge of the symbolic counting system.

A system proposed to represent approximate nonsymbolic quantity. Such representations should be distinguished from exact number-word meanings and symbolic arithmetic; causal transfer from training requires direct evidence.

Judging relative quantity from numerical symbols. Comparing a symbol pair requires relevant symbol knowledge as well as a magnitude decision; the task should not be treated as a process-pure measure.

Placing a number on a line with specified endpoints. Performance depends on numerical representation, spatial interpretation and task strategy; an intervention effect on this task is not automatically a general arithmetic effect.

A broad term for intuitions and skills concerning numbers and quantities. Studies use the term for different tasks and representations, so a number-sense score or training effect should not be assumed to identify one process or general mathematical ability.

Capacity to consider alternatives and the possibility of being mistaken. It should be distinguished from whether a particular belief is true and from speed of drawing a conclusion.

Identifying a goal, generating possible actions and evaluating their consequences. Addressing a realistic remediable problem differs from repeatedly attempting to obtain certainty about hypothetical threats.

Examination or reporting of one's own mental states. A report of an experience, an accurate prediction of performance and an explanation of the process causing a response are different claims. Experiments can test them separately.^[ref]

The introspection illusion is overconfidence in the completeness or accuracy of one’s access to the processes that produced a judgment or action. A person can accurately report a current feeling while misidentifying what caused it. Comparing verbal explanations with experimentally manipulated influences tests that distinction. Choice blindness supplies a striking example: a plausible reason can be given for an outcome covertly substituted for the one originally selected. ^[ref]

Failure to notice a mismatch between a choice and the outcome presented as that choice, sometimes followed by an explanation of the substituted outcome. Face-choice experiments provide an operational example; not every failure to detect a substitution has the same cause.^[ref]

Demand placed on limited processing resources by a task or concurrent activity. A manipulation of cognitive load may affect attention, working memory and strategy together; interpreting a difference requires checking which task information remained available.

Theoretical accounts in which some processing systems have specialised functions or restricted informational access. Claims about input selectivity, representations, learning algorithms, developmental origins and mature processing architecture should be distinguished: evidence against one does not automatically settle the others.

A proposed specialised system for aspects of language. Domain-general sequence learning can contribute to language acquisition while leaving open whether particular representations or other processing stages are specialised.

The distinction between a proposed underlying ability or representation and its expression under a particular task’s demands. An easier response format may reveal an ability missed by another format, while scaffolded success need not establish independent, fully general deployment.

Regulation of attention, behaviour or emotion in relation to goals. Measures of executive function, temperament, waiting behaviour and classroom engagement can overlap without being interchangeable.

Effortful control concerns deliberate regulation of attention and action, including inhibiting a dominant response and sustaining a less automatic one. It is an aspect of self-regulation, studied through both everyday ratings and performance tasks. These methods sample different settings and demands, so their scores need not be interchangeable.

An original task example gives a child a simple response rule, then asks for a different response when a familiar cue appears. Accuracy can depend on response inhibition, but also on understanding and remembering the rule. A low score therefore does not isolate inhibition without further comparisons. A rating of everyday effortful control instead summarizes behavior across observations and informants.

Clancy Blair and Rachel Peters Razza examined effortful control, executive function and false-belief understanding together in relation to emerging mathematics and literacy performance. Comparing these predictors helps distinguish overlapping constructs; a predictive association alone does not show that training one measured component causes an academic improvement.^[ref]

Processes influencing the course, intensity or expression of emotional responses. What is useful depends on the situation and goal; successful regulation does not require suppression of every unpleasant emotion.

Changing the interpreted meaning of an event in a way that changes its emotional implications. An experiment that alters interpretation can support a causal role for cognitive appraisal; it does not by itself show that appraisal is necessary for every emotion.

Foregoing an immediate outcome in favour of a preferred later one. Waiting can depend on control, strategy, current motivation and expectations that the later outcome will occur.^[ref]

A task offering an immediate edible reward or a larger or preferred reward after waiting. Reward visibility, instructions, experimenter reliability and the maximum permitted waiting time affect its interpretation; a duration is not automatically a pure measure of self-control.

Reading obtains meaning from written symbols through interacting perceptual, linguistic and cognitive processes. Word decoding connects print with word identification, while linguistic comprehension supports understanding of the identified language. A reader can therefore recognize individual words accurately yet struggle to understand a passage, or understand spoken language well while struggling with print. The simple view of reading makes this complementarity explicit in a model that separates the two components. ^[ref]

Awareness of the meaningful components of words and their relationships. Morphological awareness should be distinguished from biological morphology and from merely recognizing a word's visual shape.

Rapidly naming a sequence of familiar items such as colors, objects, letters or digits. This coordinated task predicts some literacy outcomes but does not isolate one cognitive or neural process.

Development of the knowledge and processes supporting identification and understanding of written language. Word recognition, fluency, language comprehension and their coordination can change at different rates; one endpoint can conceal different trajectories.

Experiences and resources associated with early literacy, including shared books and direct teaching. These activities can relate to different language and reading pathways; observational associations are not prescriptions guaranteed to cause the same outcomes.^[ref]

Persistent difficulty in an aspect of reading with functional consequences, assessed in context. Word-level difficulty and poor comprehension despite adequate decoding are distinct possible profiles.

An account in which several probabilistic risks and protective influences combine rather than one deficit being necessary and sufficient for every case. Shared risks can produce overlap while differing profiles retain practical meaning.^[ref]

Co-occurring word-reading and broader oral language difficulties. Studies selecting nonoverlapping groups are useful contrasts but do not describe the full distribution of mixed profiles.^[ref]

Poor understanding of text despite relatively adequate word-reading accuracy. Assessment should examine oral language, fluency and higher-level processes rather than infer a single cause from the profile.^[ref]

A developmental pattern centred on difficulties in accurate or fluent word reading and spelling. It is not synonymous with every comprehension problem, nor necessarily an isolated phonological deficit.

Teaching intended to develop written language skills. A learning principle must be evaluated through specified content, exposure, support, assessment and follow-up rather than inferred from an instructional label.

Teaching relations between written units and speech sounds, including their use in decoding and spelling. The actual mappings, practice and integration with text reading define the intervention.

The proposal that phonological work benefits reading most when linked to reading instruction. A matched-group intervention found greater reading progress for integrated work, even though phonology-only work particularly improved phonological tasks.^[ref]

Instruction or practice emphasising relations between written forms and meanings. Its effects must be assessed separately on trained items, unfamiliar-word reading and comprehension.

Instruction or practice emphasising relations between written forms and pronunciations. It can organise the input available for statistical learning, rather than being opposed to learning from regularities.^[ref]

Constructing an integrated interpretation of a text, including its explicit content and relevant inferences. Comprehension can depend on word decoding, vocabulary, working memory and monitoring; the contribution of one should not be inferred by ignoring the others.^[ref]

Knowledge brought to interpreting a text. It can support integration but can also produce answers not warranted by the passage, so text-topic sampling matters.

Deriving information needed to connect or interpret a text beyond what is explicitly stated. Useful inference should be distinguished from unsupported guessing based on background knowledge.

Detection and evaluation of whether a representation of a text is coherent or understood. Noticing an inconsistency and repairing it are distinguishable from correctly answering a literal question.

A component or task demand that limits successful understanding for a particular reader and text. Print access, language knowledge, inference and monitoring are candidate bottlenecks, not mutually exclusive diagnoses.

A model distinguishing decoding and linguistic comprehension as necessary contributors to reading comprehension. The product formulation motivates different profiles with similar aggregate performance, but does not license multiplying arbitrary raw test scores or treating the two components as indivisible mechanisms.^[ref]

In the idealised model $R=DC$, changing decoding by $h$ with comprehension fixed changes the product by $hC$, since $(D+h)C-DC=hC$. Similarly, changing comprehension by $k$ changes it by $kD$. ThusIf either component is zero, increasing only the other leaves the product zero. Equal products can arise from different profiles: $0.3\times 0.9=0.9\times 0.3=0.27$. These algebraic properties explain the model's complementarity; they are not estimates of treatment response or diagnostic cutoffs.

Linguistic comprehension is understanding linguistic content, including word meanings, sentence relations and discourse comprehension. It is broader than one particular listening test. In the simple view of reading, it is distinguished from word decoding: a person can understand a spoken sentence yet be unable to identify the same words in print. Comparing the two components helps explain different profiles of reading comprehension. ^[ref]

Discourse comprehension is understanding connected language across sentences or utterances. It includes tracking referents, linking events and using relevant background knowledge in comprehension to build a coherent interpretation. For example, resolving who a later pronoun refers to can require information from an earlier sentence. Correctly recognizing every word does not alone establish that these relationships were understood. ^[ref]

Understanding spoken linguistic material. It can help assess language demands separately from print decoding, but also depends on attention, memory and the temporal presentation of speech.

Identifying written words using orthographic and phonological information. Decoding accuracy or fluency should be distinguished from understanding the propositions and inferences in a text.

Deriving a pronunciation from print. Successful recoding can supply a learning opportunity for the particular written form, rather than being only a temporary alternative to recognition.^[ref]

A grapheme–phoneme correspondence links a written unit with a speech-sound unit. One grapheme can contain several letters, so correspondence is not necessarily a one-letter-to-one-sound rule. The mapping can depend on context and competing patterns in a writing system. Learning useful mappings supports phonological recoding, while recognizing the spoken form of a word is only one contribution to understanding a text. ^[ref]

Processes supporting goal-directed control, including maintaining and updating relevant information, inhibiting competing responses and changing task sets. Their importance depends on what a task requires: an initially effortful procedure may need less executive control after practice. The unity-and-diversity framework distinguishes correlated components without equating a single test score with a pure executive capacity.^[ref]

Failure to implement an intended or understood goal when the situation does not adequately trigger it. Preserved performance on highly structured tests can coexist with poor organization of open-ended activities.^[ref]

A rule-discovery and switching task using feedback about Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Performance also depends on learning, human memory, attention and general task demands.

An executive function task necessarily recruits nonexecutive processes as well as its intended control demand. A verbal inhibition task, for example, requires word comprehension and a response. Multiple indicators with different incidental demands can help separate common executive variance, but only under a defensible measurement model.^[ref]

Changing a task set, representation or strategy in response to changing goals or evidence. Switching costs can also reflect working memory, speed and comprehension of the new rule.

Alternating between task rules or response sets. Switch costs compare changing with repeating a rule, but also depend on preparation, competing mappings, cue processing and baseline performance.

Control over prepotent or competing responses. Its operation is task-dependent: following an opposite tapping rule and suppressing irrelevant numerical information share a broad control demand but include different perceptual, linguistic and domain-specific processes.

Response inhibition is the suppression or cancellation of an action that would otherwise be made. It is one aspect of inhibitory control. For example, in a stop-signal task a person prepares a button press in response to a go cue, but occasionally receives a later signal to stop. Successful stopping requires a change to an already prepared response.

The delay between go and stop signals matters: a very late stop signal leaves less opportunity for cancellation. Models use performance across delays to estimate stop-signal reaction time, rather than directly timing an invisible mental event. Brain lesion studies can test whether damage to a region is associated with impaired stopping, while interpretation still depends on task demands and the measurement model.^[ref]

Control of the influence of an observed action when a different action is required. It can be studied through compatible/incompatible response tasks with separate controls for spatial interference.

A task in which an occasional signal instructs cancellation of an otherwise required response. Successful performance requires detection and interpretation of the signal as well as stopping.

A model-derived estimate of the latency of stopping. It is not directly observed as a movement time, and its interpretation depends on assumptions about the go and stop processes.

An experimenter taps once or twice and the child must produce the opposite count. The task taxes inhibition of imitation together with maintenance of the response rule; its score is not a process-pure measure.^[ref]

In scientific psychology, intelligence concerns capacities for learning, reasoning and adapting performance to cognitive demands. It is operationalized through tasks and models rather than one directly observed biological quantity. Correlated performance across different tasks motivates latent-factor accounts, while particular abilities can show different profiles. A score therefore needs its task content, comparison population and measurement properties before it supports a claim about a person’s broader abilities. ^[ref]

The general intelligence factor, conventionally $g$, is a latent variable used to account for shared variation among performances on different cognitive tasks. Charles Spearman's 1904 analysis distinguished a common component from task-specific contributions, helping establish the historical basis of this approach.^[ref]

A simple one-factor measurement model writes a standardized test score aswhere ${\lambda }_j$ is a factor loading. Suppose all variables have zero mean, $\mathrm{Var}(g)=1$, each ${ϵ}_j$ has zero covariance with $g$, and distinct residuals have zero covariance with one another. Then for different tests,Thus a single shared component can explain correlated scores even when the tests contain different content. The covariance equation follows from the stated assumptions; it does not identify a unique biological cause of the correlations.

Factor analysis estimates such models and evaluates their fit. The general intelligence factor should also be distinguished from a first component obtained by principal component analysis: one is a proposed latent structure with residual assumptions, while the other is a variance-maximizing summary of observed scores. Interpretation requires the tasks, population and measurement assumptions, rather than a number alone.

The capacity measured by tasks emphasizing novel reasoning rather than acquired factual knowledge. Statistical overlap with executive-test performance does not by itself establish a unique causal direction.

Proposed abilities involved in understanding and using information about people and social situations. Competing definitions emphasize social understanding, knowledge, human memory, effective behavior or self-perceived skill; measures of these are not automatically interchangeable indicators of one factor.

A 21-item self-report instrument developed with dimensions labeled social information processing, social skills and social awareness. Its internal structure is evidence about this operationalization; it does not by itself settle the organization of all social abilities.

Sensitivity to relevant social cues and consequences. Its operational meaning depends on the instrument; a factor with this label in a self-report scale is not automatically identical to a performance ability.

Behaviors supporting effective interaction in a specified context. Typical real-world behavior, maximal ability and self-perceived competence are related but distinct measurement targets.

Social knowledge is knowledge about people, relationships and social conventions. It can inform a prediction about another person’s behavior without guaranteeing that the prediction is accurate in every setting. A test of an expected response can depend on cultural familiarity as well as the ability to infer a mental state. Separating knowledge of a convention from applying it helps interpret measures of social intelligence. ^[ref]

human memory for socially relevant information. A distinct label does not establish a separate human memory mechanism; social and nonsocial tasks must be compared while controlling method and general human memory demands.

Interpreting socially relevant information such as intentions or implications of behavior. Performance depends on the information available, the scoring criterion and potentially general verbal or human memory abilities.

A mental state is a condition attributed to a cognitive system, such as a belief, desire, intention, perception or feeling. Experimental psychology studies such states through operational measures and predictions about behavior. Two people can see the same event yet hold different beliefs because they have different prior information. Distinguishing the state itself from the evidence used to infer it is central to studying social cognition. ^[ref]

A motivational attitude toward an outcome. Attributing a desire is distinct from establishing what an agent believes about how the outcome can be achieved.

A state directed toward bringing about an action or outcome. Inferring an intended goal from behaviour need not imply representing every belief or reason of the agent.

A state with representational content taken to be true. Attributing another person’s belief requires distinguishing its content from one’s own knowledge of the actual situation.

A belief whose content differs from the actual state of affairs. A false belief is distinct from ignorance: an ignorant agent need not have any particular mistaken representation. False-belief understanding is the capacity to represent and reason about this difference.

A family of accounts distinguishing relatively automatic or intuitive processing from more controlled, demanding processing. Specific theories differ about conflict detection, engagement and correction; a biased final response does not establish that statistical information was never processed.

A systematic tendency for judgments or behavior to depart from a stated benchmark. The benchmark and task interpretation must be justified; a departure is not by itself a complete psychological mechanism.

An increase in the apparent quality of an explanation associated with neuroscience information that does not improve its logic. The original text-based experiment distinguishes this effect from a general claim that every brain image or biological explanation is misleading.^[ref]

A systematic tendency to resolve ambiguous information in a particular direction, such as threat. Task performance, current anxiety and durable clinical vulnerability are distinct variables.^[ref]

A pattern in which low observed performers overestimate their performance, often accompanied by hypotheses about deficits in evaluating their own answers. Task skill, comparison-group beliefs, measurement noise and grouping can all affect the observed relation; the pattern alone does not identify one cause.^[ref]

Let $X=A+\epsilon$ and $S=A+\eta$, where latent score $A$ has normal distribution with mean $\mu$ and variance ${\sigma }_A^2$, and the centred normal errors are independent of each other and $A$. Since $\mathrm{Cov}(S,X)={\sigma }_A^2$ and $\mathrm{Var}(X)={\sigma }_A^2+{\sigma }_{\epsilon }^2$, Gaussian conditional expectation gives $\mathbb{E}[S\mid X=x]=\mu +\lambda (x-\mu )$ with $\lambda ={\sigma }_A^2/({\sigma }_A^2+{\sigma }_{\epsilon }^2)$. Subtracting $x$ proves the formula. For $0<\lambda <1$, selecting scores below the mean creates positive expected self-assessment errors relative to those observed scores. This is a mathematical possibility, not an empirical estimate of any particular study's contribution from measurement error.

Judging probability through resemblance to a typical case or generating process. Resemblance need not incorporate prevalence or evidence reliability, so it can yield plausible-seeming but poorly calibrated probability judgments.

Underweighting an applicable class prevalence when evaluating case-specific evidence. Sensitivity to whether descriptions and prevalence conflict can survive even when a final answer underweights the statistical information.

Reasoning about uncertain events, evidence and predictions. Normative evaluation requires explicit assumptions about sampling and evidential reliability, as well as the mathematical rule used for updating.

Counts preserving how cases from a common population fall into nested classes and evidence subsets. Bayesian inference can then use a ratio of joint counts, $n(H\cap E)/n(E)$. For uniform sampling from those cases, conditional probability is the number satisfying both class and evidence divided by the number satisfying the evidence, so the ratio follows directly without reconstructing separately normalized rates. Separately normalizing each class to the same artificial denominator does not preserve the original prevalence automatically.

A change in processing caused by a preceding meaning-related cue. Contrasting related and unrelated cues can reveal how representations influence later performance, but task expectations and response strategies must be controlled. Category-name cues can test whether category typicality affects processing beyond explicit ratings.

Assigning objects or events to psychologically relevant classes. Evidence about classification speed, typicality and generalization constrains representations and decision processes, but no single behavioral effect uniquely identifies a storage format.

Category verification is a task in which a person decides whether an example belongs to a stated category. A participant might judge “a robin is a bird” as true and “a robin is a fish” as false. Researchers measure accuracy and reaction time while controlling features such as wording, familiarity and the expected response.

The task is useful because equally correct category members need not be verified equally quickly. However, response speed concerns the categorization process, not a mathematical degree of membership. Sharon Lee Armstrong and colleagues compared typicality judgments with classification for well-defined categories such as odd integers, showing why graded judgments alone need not imply fuzzy category boundaries.^[ref]

Typicality is how representative an example seems of a category. A robin may be judged a more typical bird than a penguin, although both are birds. Such judgments can reflect familiarity, similarity to other members or the purposes for which a category is used; they are not the same measurement as a yes-or-no judgment of category membership.

Even a sharply defined mathematical category can produce graded psychological judgments. People can regard some odd integers as better examples than others, despite every odd integer satisfying the same membership rule. Sharon Lee Armstrong and colleagues used such cases to show that graded typicality does not, by itself, establish that a concept lacks a definition.^[ref]

Category membership concerns whether an object or event is assigned to a specified category. It is distinct from its judged typicality, how confident a person is about the judgment and how quickly the judgment is made. A category can have a precise membership rule while its examples differ in familiarity.

For example, 3 and 97 are both odd integers: each has the form $2k+1$ for an integer $k$. A participant might nevertheless consider one a more typical example or identify it faster. Those responses concern the categorization process, rather than making one integer mathematically more odd than the other.

Sharon Lee Armstrong and collaborators compared typicality judgments and category verification for everyday categories and well-defined categories including odd and even numbers. Their experiments show why graded responses alone cannot establish that the underlying membership conditions are graded. Distinguishing membership, typicality and reaction time avoids drawing a stronger representational conclusion than the task supports.^[ref]

Color categorization groups perceived colors into classes, such as those associated with color names. It is distinct from merely detecting that two stimuli differ. A study can separately ask what a sample is called, which comparison matches it and how long the response takes.

Jonathan Winawer and collaborators compared Russian and English speakers on a speeded discrimination task using blue stimuli that crossed the Russian light-blue/dark-blue naming boundary. Russian speakers showed a category-related advantage that was disrupted by verbal interference. The design compares naming boundaries, discrimination performance and a concurrent task, rather than inferring color perception from vocabulary alone.^[ref]

The result constrains how linguistic processing can contribute during a task. It does not show that a person cannot distinguish unnamed colors, or that all aspects of color vision are fixed by the words of a language. Categorical perception, naming and reaction time provide related but different measurements.

A tendency to treat a category as having a stable underlying nature that explains its nonobvious properties. This can support expectations beyond appearance without establishing that the assumed essence is biologically real.

Representing people as members of socially meaningful classes. Social categorization can organize expectations and identity; a category label alone does not determine whether its consequences are inclusive or prejudicial.

An arrangement in which group boundaries on different dimensions do not coincide. A former outgroup member may share another valued identity with the observer. This can soften a single division, but need not eliminate exclusion of people outside both categories.

Changing the category structure through which people represent an interaction, for example by replacing two opposed groups with one inclusive group. Recategorization should be assessed through perceived membership and behavior rather than inferred from labels alone.

An account of prejudice reduction in which former outgroup members become included in a common ingroup. The proposed mechanism extends favorable ingroup responses across a previous boundary. Whether the common identity recognizes or suppresses subgroup identity is a substantive boundary condition.

Reducing the relevance of a group boundary by individuating interaction partners. A central limitation is generalization: liking a particular person need not change prejudice toward other members of that person's outgroup.

More favorable evaluation or treatment of an ingroup than an outgroup. It should be distinguished from absolute hostility toward an outgroup and measured separately from consequential discrimination.

A group represented as excluding the self in a relevant comparison. A person can belong to a social outgroup on one dimension and share an ingroup membership on another.