Attention, Memory & Automaticity

Abstractions about how attention, memory, and automatic processing distort judgment and experience — retrospective evaluation biases (peak-end rule, duration neglect, recency effect), attentional priming (Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, novelty effect), and conflicts between automatic and controlled processing (Stroop effect, Humphrey's law, dual-process theory).

13 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Baader Meinhof Phenomenon
• Crespi Effect — Read operant behavior after a reward change as a discrepancy-driven transient rather than an absolute-value response: animals shifted up overshoot same-reward controls (elation) and animals shifted down undershoot them (depression), calibrated to the signed gap between delivery and a recalibrating expectation.
• Dual-process Theory — Models cognition as the interaction of a fast, automatic, associative process (System 1) supplying default responses and a slow, effortful, rule-based process (System 2) selectively recruited to endorse or override them under conflict, novelty, or stakes.
• Duration Neglect — The judgment bias in which the length of a bounded experience contributes negligible weight to its retrospective evaluation, which is instead built from a representative peak and the final moments (the peak-end rule) — so remembered utility systematically diverges from the integral of what was lived.
• Emotional Response — The coordinated four-stage reaction an affective agent produces when a stimulus is appraised as significant for its goals: appraisal triggers a bundled physiological-expressive-motivational package that then biases subsequent attention, memory, and choice.
• Humphrey's Law — Consciously attending to a well-practiced automatic skill degrades it — declarative monitoring reinvested into a proceduralized pathway fragments and slows execution, which is why the expert chokes while the novice, who has no such pathway, does not.
• Initiative Loss — The failure mode in which an actor's decision cycle becomes structurally subordinated to an opponent's tempo, so every move is a forced reaction — a trap that faster reacting only deepens, recoverable only by changing the move-space.
• Near-Miss Effect — The operant finding that an outcome falling just short of the target — though it pays exactly zero — sustains responding more than a clearly distant failure, because the internal reinforcement signal is weighted by counterfactual proximity to the goal rather than by actual payoff.
• Novelty Effect — Recognise that a newly introduced stimulus draws an elevated response tied to its recency, not its intrinsic worth, which decays near-exponentially toward a steady-state baseline — so short-window evaluation systematically over-estimates the intervention's lasting effect.
• Peak-end rule — Predict the remembered value of an extended experience from just two moments — its most intense point and its final moment, averaged — while the duration and the integral of momentary affect over the interior receive near-zero weight.
• Recency Effect — The empirical finding that the last items in a temporal sequence are recalled or weighted more heavily than middle items, driven by a short-term-store component and a temporal-distinctiveness component that a filled delay can separate.
• Stroop Effect — Measure cognitive control by the extra time and errors it costs to name a color word's ink when the word disagrees — a competition between an over-trained automatic pathway and a weaker task-relevant one, resolved by top-down inhibition.
• Tetris Effect — The involuntary persistence of patterns from a recently, intensively practised activity into perception, imagery, and dreams — memory consolidation replaying strongly encoded content through a non-declarative pathway as a side-channel of skill learning.