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]

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.

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.

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.

Understanding linguistic content, including word meanings, sentence relations and discourse. The construct is broader than any one listening test.

Understanding connected language beyond an isolated word or sentence, including reference, coherence and relations between events.

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 relation between a written unit and a speech-sound unit. Its usefulness can depend on context and competing mappings.

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.

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]

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, 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.

Knowledge concerning people, relationships or conventions. Cultural and contextual specificity can affect what a test treats as an appropriate response.

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

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.

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.

A group represented as including the self in a relevant context. Which group counts as an ingroup can change with the dimension of social categorization.

Forming and interpreting a concept from other concepts. A theory of representation must explain how combined concepts acquire constraints and typical instances, including cases not captured by a simple average of their separate typical examples.

An account emphasizing defining conditions for category membership. Such criteria can coexist with graded identification or typicality effects; those effects alone do not prove the absence of a definitional representation.

An account in which classification depends on stored examples and their similarity to a new case. An unseen central case can resemble many stored examples and receive strong aggregate support, so prototype-like behavior need not imply an explicitly stored average.

An account in which category judgments rely on similarity to an abstract or representative summary. It naturally explains centrality and generalization effects, but must be distinguished from exemplar theory and from a descriptive typicality gradient.

A pattern of overlapping attributes among members without requiring one attribute set shared identically by every member. The distribution of attributes in competing categories matters as well as their occurrence within one category. Family resemblance can describe a category structure without specifying how it is learned or stored.

A central or representative summary used in a categorization account. It need not be a previously encountered individual, and its selection can depend on the modeled feature distribution, comparison classes and goals.