Social Cognition & Perception

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Abstractions about how people perceive, interpret, and respond to others and to information, including social-perceptual processes (empathy, eye contact, emotion perception), biases and interpretive tendencies (hostile attribution bias, cognitive specialization), and models of memory and attentional cognition (working memory training, memory inhibition, subitizing).

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.

• Cognitive specialization — Cognitive specialization suggests that certain behaviors, often in the domain of social communication, are passed on to offspring and refined to be maximally beneficial by the process of natural selection.
• Emotion perception — Emotion perception refers to the capacities and abilities of recognizing and identifying emotions in others, in addition to biological and physiological processes involved.
• Empathy — Empathy is generally described as the ability to perceive another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience.
• Eye contact — In people, eye contact is a form of nonverbal communication and can have a large influence on social behavior.
• Hostile attribution bias — Hostile attribution bias, or hostile attribution of intent, is the tendency to interpret others' behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.
• Memory inhibition — In psychology, memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information.
• Parallel constraint satisfaction processes — In behavioral psychology, parallel constraint satisfaction processes (PCSP) is a model of human behavior that integrates connectionism, neural networks, and parallel distributed processing models.
• Social cognition — Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations.
• Somatic theory — Somatic theory is a theory of human social behavior based on the somatic marker hypothesis of António Damásio.
• Steering cognition — In psychology, steering cognition is a model of a cognitive executive function which contributes to how attention is regulated and corresponding responses coordinated.
• Subitizing — Subitizing is the rapid, accurate, and effortless ability to perceive small quantities of items in a set, typically when there are four or fewer items, without relying on linguistic or arithmetic processes.
• Unitary theories of memory — Unitary theories of memory are hypotheses that attempt to unify mechanisms of short-term and long-term memory.
• Working memory training — Working memory training is intended to improve a person's working memory.