Named Cognitive & Behavioral Effects¶

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Abstractions that name a specific, mechanism-explained psychological effect — attentional, perceptual, or motivational — such as the Stroop, Simon, placebo, and near-miss effects, procedural memory, and stimulus-response compatibility, each describing how an internal process is biased or reshaped by context.

32 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.

Attentional Bias — The systematic tilt in how finite attention is allocated across the perceptual field — pulled by anxiety, reward history, depression, or expertise rather than sensory salience — a property of the perceiver, at perceptual selection, upstream of judgment.
Attentional Blink — Attentional Blink is a recurring cognitive psychology, visual attention identity in which processing a first rapid target transiently impairs report of a second target arriving roughly 200–500 milliseconds later amid distractors.
Central Executive Network — Coordinate goal-directed, externally oriented cognition through a distributed frontoparietal control network that maintains task rules, working-memory contents, and top-down attention while flexibly coupling to other systems as demands change.
Corollary discharge theory — A sensorimotor account in which a copy of an outgoing movement command predicts the sensory consequences of self-motion, allowing comparison with incoming sensory change so self-generated and external motion can be distinguished.
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.
Emotion and memory — The set of attention, encoding, consolidation, retrieval, and reconstruction effects through which emotional arousal and valence can strengthen some memories while weakening, narrowing, or biasing others.
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.
Excitation-transfer theory — A theory that residual physiological arousal from an earlier stimulus can be attributed to a later stimulus and intensify the later emotional response.
Extinction (psychology) — Reduction of a conditioned response after its sustaining outcome is withheld, through nonreinforcement or unpaired cue exposure, often as context-sensitive new learning.
Fading Affect Bias — The aggregate tendency for negative affect associated with remembered episodes to diminish more than positive affect over a delay, under a stated rating design.
Gating Mechanism (neural networks) — A neural network computes learned, input-dependent control values that modulate which signals or computational paths contribute downstream.
Implicit Authentication — Verifying a user from ordinary interaction signals without demanding an explicit credential at every check.
Incubation (Problem Solving) — Problem-solving incubation is a period away from a prepared problem, studied for its conditional effect on later attempts.
Motivated forgetting — Reduced accessibility or retention of unwanted memories theorized to arise partly from conscious suppression or unconscious defensive motivation.
N-Back Task — Judge each item in an ongoing stimulus sequence against the item a fixed number of positions earlier.
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.
Negativity Bias — Weight a psychological impact function asymmetrically around zero so that negative stimuli, events, and information claim disproportionately more attention, memory, and motivational pull than equally intense positive ones, at a stable offset ratio commonly running several-to-one.
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.
Perruchet Effect — A conditioning dissociation in which recent trial runs drive conscious expectancy and conditioned responding in opposite directions.
Placebo Effect — An inert intervention produces a real, measurable improvement because the patient's expectations recruit the body's own regulatory pathways — which is why efficacy must be judged by a controlled comparison, not a single-arm gain.
Placing reflexes — Placing reflexes denotes tests in veterinary medicine in veterinary neurology.
Positivity Effect — The age-graded shift in attention and memory toward positive and away from negative information, driven not by chronological age but by a narrowing perceived time horizon that re-weights goals — a goal-driven, load-sensitive strategy, not a passive decline.
Positivity Offset — The positivity offset is greater positive than negative evaluative response when affective input is weak or absent.
Premovement neuronal activity — Premovement neuronal activity is a reproducible modulation of neuronal firing that occurs before overt voluntary movement and can encode preparation, selection, timing, direction, force, or expected consequences of the action.
Procedural memory — Long-term implicit memory expressed through improved, often automatic performance of learned motor or cognitive procedures without requiring conscious recollection of the learning episode.
Retrieval-Induced Forgetting — Recast retrieval as a selection operation in a competitive field: actively recalling some items from a shared-cue set inhibits the related-but-unretrieved competitors, leaving them measurably less recallable than if nothing had been practiced at all.
Simon Effect — Explain why responses are faster when a stimulus's task-irrelevant spatial location matches the response side: the perceptual system pre-attentively generates a same-side response code that facilitates selection when it agrees with the task-mandated code and costs ~30 ms when it conflicts.
Stimulus Control — A learned operant relation in which an antecedent condition changes the likelihood of a response because it has signaled different consequences for that response.
Stimulus–Response Compatibility — When a stimulus automatically activates a response code, performance improves if that code agrees with the task-mandated response and degrades if the codes conflict, even when the triggering feature is irrelevant.
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.
Subject-Expectancy Effect — Treat a participant's beliefs about an intervention as a genuine driver of their reported and physiological responses, so any unblinded measurement confounds the manipulation with anticipation until blinding, placebo control, or a balanced-placebo design pulls the two apart.
Yerkes–Dodson Law — The finding that task performance improves with arousal up to an interior optimum then deteriorates — an inverted-U whose peak sits at lower arousal for complex tasks and higher for simple ones, so under- and over-arousal are opposite failures needing opposite fixes.