Cognitive & Behavioral Theories

← Back to Domain-Specific Families

Abstractions about how mind, behavior, and cognition are theorized and modeled, including behaviorism and behavioral repertoires (ethograms), situated, ecological, and embodied cognition (image schemas), neural models of consciousness and language processing, and design-oriented or computational accounts like function-behavior-structure ontology and simulation.

16 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.

• Activation Function — A specified neural-network map that transforms a unit or layer's preactivation into the activation passed onward or read as output.
• Argument from Poor Design — A biological design critique that uses an organismal feature's apparent awkwardness under a stated ideal-design expectation as a reason to question that expectation or an inference from fit to ideal design.
• Behaviorism — A family of approaches that explains human and animal behavior primarily through observable relations among environmental events, learning histories, and responses rather than autonomous inner mental causes.
• Dehaene–Changeux model — A neural-network implementation of the global neuronal workspace account in which local processors and long-range workspace neurons model conscious access, decision-making, and reportable cognitive integration.
• Ecological psychology — A psychological approach that studies perception and action as a coupled organism–environment system, commonly through direct realism, affordances, ambient information, and dynamical relations.
• Ethogram — An operationally described repertoire of animal behaviors used to recognize and compare acts within a declared species or study scope.
• Function-Behaviour-Structure ontology — The Function-Behaviour-Structure ontology represents a designed object through what it is for, what it does, and how it is constituted, and models designing as transformations among those three views.
• Functional Fixedness — The cognitive bias in which encoding an object under its conventional category label crowds out inspection of its raw physical properties, blocking the solver from a non-conventional use the problem needs and the object's properties would permit.
• Image Schema — Use a recurring embodied spatial or dynamic pattern to structure experience and, sometimes, abstract meaning.
• Language processing in the brain — The distributed neural transformations that map spoken, written, or signed linguistic input and communicative intentions through phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and sensorimotor representations into comprehension or production.
• Naturalization of intentionality — According to Franz Brentano, intentionality refers to the "aboutness of mental states that cannot be a physical relation between a mental state and what it is about (its object) because in a physical relation each of the relata must exist whereas the objects of mental states might not.".
• Poiesis — Poiesis is the process by which something not previously existing is brought into being, including self-producing forms such as autopoiesis.
• Reactive Programming — A programming paradigm that declares dependencies among changing values or events and lets an execution model propagate their effects to derived computations.
• Simulation — The execution or enactment of a model through states, events, or responses so selected behavior of a real, possible, or hypothesized target can be explored under declared conditions.
• Situated Cognition — Hold that knowing and skilled performance are constitutively of their situation — distributed across agent, tools, and setting — not a context-free program the situation merely modulates, forcing a constitutive-versus-causal test on any competence.
• Timing Risk — The failure mode where a technically sound product, technology, or policy fails not from its own defects but because the surrounding environment is not yet — or is no longer — ready to absorb it, treating environmental readiness as a risk factor independent of execution.