Cognitive Science

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48 primes originate from Cognitive Science and 36 more draw from it as a secondary origin — sort the Origin column to separate them. They span 50 subdomains; sort by that column to group them, or click any subdomain to filter to it.

Prime	Origin	Subdomain	Description
Abstraction	Also draws from	—	Focus on core elements.
Abstraction in Art	Also draws from	—	Remove literal representation.
Accommodation	Primary	—	Systems modify internal structure or behavior in response to external pressures.
Additive Bias	Primary	Problem Solving Biases	When asked to improve a system, agents reliably reach first for adding a component and underweight removing one, so the search distribution over transformations is direction-asymmetric and long-lived systems accrete past their purpose-optimal complexity.
Alertness	Primary	Vigilance and Readiness	A standing capacity to notice, distinct from the act of attending.
Analogy	Primary	—	Transfer structure between domains.
Anthropomorphism	Primary	Social Cognition and Attribution	Surface cues recruit a human agent-model for a nonhuman or non-agent target whose agency or mental states have not been established, so intention, emotion, or understanding is inferred more cheaply than it is verified.
Associative Memory	Also draws from	—	Content-addressable storage where a cue retrieves linked content.
Associative Property Transfer	Primary	Social Inference	A property flows along an associative link rather than along a causal or evidential one.
Attentional Capacity	Primary	—	Finite pool of selection bandwidth whose exceeded supply degrades processing through interference, slowing, or capture.
Autopoiesis	Also draws from	—	Self-producing systems.
Awareness	Primary	Cognitive SystemsConsciousness Studies	Awareness is the capacity of a cognitive or adaptive system to register a target state or occurrence and make that registration available for discrimination, report, coordination, or context-sensitive response.
Bayesian Cue Integration	Primary	Perception Multisensory Integration	Multiple noisy cues to one quantity combine by inverse-variance weighting into a lower-variance estimate.
Belief Formation	Primary	—	Commitment-transition by which an agent comes to hold a proposition as true and act accordingly.
Bias	Also draws from	—	Systematic, directional error distinct from random noise.
Binding Problem	Primary	Neuroscience	Features extracted in parallel along separate channels must be re-paired to the right objects using co-occurrence information no single channel carries.
Bottom-Up Perspectives	Also draws from	—	Local-driven analysis.
Caching	Also draws from	—	Store for faster retrieval.
Cognitive Entrenchment	Also draws from	—	Rigid thinking patterns.
Common Ground	Primary	Pragmatics	Iterated mutual recognition stabilises a shared body of propositions that licenses abbreviated, indexical communication and makes joint action safe.
Comparison	Primary	—	Place items in a shared frame along chosen dimensions to read off a relation between them.
Compression	Also draws from	—	Reduce redundancy.
Concentration	Also draws from	Principles of WarEpidemiology	Massing a divisible resource or effort at the decisive point rather than spreading it thin — the deliberate creation of local superiority by accepting weakness elsewhere.
Conceptual Blending	Primary	—	Combine ideas into new space.
Contextual Mode Switching	Also draws from	—	Adapt communication.
Counterfactual Proximity Weighting	Primary	Reward and Signal Learning	An internal signal is graded not by the outcome alone but by its distance to a nearby counterfactual outcome of different value, so near misses carry near-reward signals.
Decision	Primary	—	Committing to one alternative from a set under uncertainty and trade-off, collapsing open deliberation into a chosen path and foreclosing the others.
Decomposition	Also draws from	—	Breaking a whole into parts that can be analyzed independently and recombined to reconstitute the whole, making complexity tractable through divide-and-conquer.
Differential Decay	Primary	Memory and Communication	Two coupled signals decay at different rates, so the surviving component carries forward a meaning the original pair never intended — often with a sign flip.
Encoding Specificity	Primary	Memory and Retrieval	Retrievability depends on the overlap between features active at encoding and features available at retrieval, because context is co-encoded into the storage key.
Equivocation	Primary	Argumentation	A single token is used with two distinct referents at two points in a chain that presumes meaning-fixity, so an apparently sound inference silently fails.
Expectation Violation	Primary	Prediction and Attention	An active prediction or schema specifies what should occur; an incompatible realization crosses a mismatch threshold and triggers surprise, reorientation, or repair, making the violated expectation diagnostically visible.
Figure-Ground	Primary	—	Perceptual organization of a field into salient figure and receding ground.
Frame of Reference	Also draws from	—	Observational perspective.
Fundamental Attribution Error	Also draws from	—	Misattribute causes.
Gestalt Principles	Also draws from	—	Perceptual grouping rules.
Iconicity	Also draws from	—	Resemblance-based meaning.
Indexicality	Also draws from	—	Sign refers to its object through an actual existential or causal connection rather than resemblance or convention.
Interleaving	Primary	—	Mixing topics during practice to improve discrimination and retention.
Invisible Affordance	Primary	Option Visibility	A capability, right, or action-possibility genuinely exists in a system, but the surfaces a prospective user reliably samples carry no signal of its existence, so the user's effective option-set excludes it despite its being real and available.
Joint Attention	Primary	Developmental Psychology	Two or more agents share an attentional target and each knows the other attends to it.
Joint vs. Separate Evaluation	Primary	Evaluation Mode	The same option is ranked differently when evaluated alongside alternatives than when evaluated in isolation against an internal reference, because each evaluation mode makes a different subset of attributes evaluable and thus carries the verdict.
Knowledge-Action Gap	Primary	Behavioral Systems	An agent holds accurate knowledge of the appropriate action, sincerely intends to take it, and systematically does not — because knowing and doing are separable load-bearing states and intervention on the knowing channel does not, by itself, change the doing channel.
Law of the Instrument	Primary	Capability Shaped Perception	The tools an agent possesses systematically bias what it recognises as a problem, what category the problem is sorted into, and what intervention is generated — the world's joints get carved into shapes the tool can grip, and joints it cannot grip become invisible.
Learning Curve Effects	Also draws from	Operations Management	Unit cost falls predictably with cumulative production experience.
Linguistic Universals	Also draws from	—	Shared language features.
Markedness	Also draws from	—	Default vs marked forms.
Mastery Learning	Also draws from	—	Ensure full understanding.
Mental Model	Also draws from	—	Internal system representation.
Metaphor	Also draws from	—	Conceptual mapping.
Narrative Persuasion	Also draws from	Marketing and Advertising	Shift attitude or belief through story-mediated transportation that bypasses counter-argument by delivering the payload as experience rather than claim.
Navigation	Primary	Spatial Cognition and Wayfinding	A positioned agent moves through a structured space toward a goal using an incomplete map, staying oriented at each step.
Pattern Completion (Filling the Incomplete)	Primary	—	Infer missing structure.
Pattern Recognition	Primary	—	Identify regularities.
Perception Action Loop	Primary	Embodied Cognition	Perception and action are constitutively coupled: action moves the sensing apparatus, that movement changes what is sensed, and what is sensed becomes the basis for the next action, in one closed loop with no clean sense-think-act stages.
Perceptual Expertise	Primary	Perceptual Learning and ExpertiseMachine Learning	Repeated category-specific exposure reallocates representational resolution toward the distinctions that vary within the trained category, so experts individuate its members finely while sparsely sampled categories remain coarsely coded.
Plan	Primary	PlanningAction Theory	A plan is an externalized or internally maintained, revisable arrangement of intended actions, dependencies, timing, resources, and contingencies directed from a represented present state toward an objective.
Planning	Primary	—	Construct a revisable sequence, dependency structure, or policy that connects a represented present state to a desired future state before committing the corresponding actions.
Precision Weighting	Primary	Bayesian Brain and Predictive Processing	Signals about the same latent quantity receive influence in proportion to estimated precision, so more reliable evidence contributes more while context may revise the weights.
Priming	Also draws from	—	Prior exposure to a stimulus transiently activates related representations in memory, biasing or speeding subsequent processing, often without awareness.
Problem Representation	Primary	Problem Solving and Search	The chosen encoding of a problem fixes which operations and intermediate states are available, and therefore which solutions can be found at all, before any solving begins.
Problem Solving	Also draws from	Cognitive PsychologyProblem Space Theory	Problem solving is the goal-directed process of representing an obstructed or underdetermined state, generating or selecting possible transformations, testing them against constraints and evidence, and carrying an adequate path to a validated solution.
Problem Space	Primary	—	Range of possibilities.
Production Signature	Also draws from	Source Attribution	A production process involuntarily imprints stable regularities on its output, letting an analyst attribute the output to its source.
Prospective Memory	Primary	Memory and Executive Function	An intended future action is encoded paired with a triggering cue, persists latently without rehearsal, and is retrieved and executed when a parallel cue-detection process fires.
Prototype Theory	Primary	Categorization	Categories are organized around their best examples rather than by necessary-and-sufficient definitions, modeling kinds as centers with gradients rather than boxes with edges.
Pruning	Primary	Neural Development and Plasticity	A system over-generates components, then removes the under-used subset on a use- or fitness-signal, leaving a leaner, more specialized configuration that could not have been built directly.
Reality Monitoring	Primary	Memory and Source Attribution	A system holding items from multiple source classes must, at use-time, attribute each item to its source — most basically internally-generated versus externally-perceived — with characteristic errors when the cues mislead.
Reductionism	Also draws from	Philosophy of Science	Explaining a whole entirely in terms of its constituent parts.
Relative direction	Primary	Spatial CognitionFrames of Reference	Relative direction specifies an orientation or bearing by comparing a target direction with a declared reference frame, axis, observer, or heading rather than asserting an unqualified absolute orientation.
Representation	Also draws from	—	Model complex ideas.
Schema	Also draws from	—	Structured knowledge framework.
Script	Primary	Knowledge Representation	A stored representation of a familiar situation as a temporally and causally ordered sequence of events with role-slots, props, and conditions, against which encounters are interpreted and deviations detected as breaches.
Search and Retrieval	Also draws from	—	Locate and extract information.
Sensemaking	Also draws from	—	Interpret ambiguous situations.
Shared Mental Model	Primary	Distributed Cognition	A jointly maintained external artefact anchoring distributed reasoning.
Signal Detection Theory	Primary	Decision and Psychophysics	Every decision under noise factorizes into a sensitivity that fixes the achievable error trade-off and a freely-chosen criterion that distributes errors along it.
Similarity Measure	Also draws from	Measurement TheoryInformation Retrieval	Map an ordered pair, under a declared representation and relevance rule, to a comparable degree of likeness; the score may be nonmetric or asymmetric, and changing the frame can reverse what counts as near.
Situation Awareness	Primary	Human Factors and Safety	Acting on a system that keeps moving requires three distinct cognitive products — perceiving current elements, comprehending their meaning, and projecting their near-future trajectory.
Streetlight Effect	Also draws from	Methodology of Inquiry	Search effort concentrates where evidence is easiest to observe rather than where the sought answer is most likely to lie, systematically substituting accessibility for relevance.
Switching Cost	Primary	Executive Function and Systems Design	Moving between stateful modes incurs a per-transition overhead — unload, load, cold-start, residual interference — that is structurally distinct from steady-state cost and dominates under frequent switching.
Theory Of Mind	Primary	Social Cognition	An agent maintains a separate, updateable model of another agent's hidden states and routes behaviour through that model rather than through ground truth.
Thought Experiment	Also draws from	—	Test a claim or expose a concept by stipulating an imagined case, propagating its constraints, and treating the resulting fit, conflict, or consequence as evidence for revision.
Top-Down Perspectives	Also draws from	—	Centralized control.