How the mind works
18 articles
- Architecture of the mind The main accounts of how the mind is organised, classical, connectionist, embodied and dynamical, and Bayesian, and the unified cognitive architectures that try to bring them together
- Associative learning Learning links between events through prediction error, the two families of error-driven models, and whether human associative learning is really reasoning
- Attention Selecting some information over the rest, dividing it across tasks and sustaining it over time, and why perceptual load theory is now in doubt
- Bayesian models of cognition Treating perception, reasoning and learning as probabilistic inference, and the dispute over whether such models are constrained enough to explain anything
- Connectionism Modelling cognition with networks of simple units, the systematicity challenge from classical theorists, and the past-tense debate
- Dual-process theory The idea that thinking runs on fast intuitive and slow deliberate processes, and the disputes over their sequence and over whether two types exist at all
- Embodied cognition Accounts that ground cognition in the body, its actions and its environment, including dynamical and predictive views, and the replication record of their key evidence
- Explanation and understanding How explanations given to a listener produce an accurate mental model: the illusion of explanatory depth, refutation, analogy, adapting to the listener's knowledge, and the thin evidence on AI-generated explanations.
- Human cognition Overview of the mental processes cognitive psychology studies, how reference works divide them, how they depend on each other, and where the field's main disputes lie
- Judgment and decision-making How people estimate likelihoods and choose under uncertainty: heuristics and biases, fast-and-frugal heuristics, loss aversion, and which classic findings replicate
- Language Producing and understanding words and sentences: staged versus interactive models of speaking, feedback in word recognition, parsing, prediction, and the past-tense debate
- Memory How the mind keeps information over time: stores and systems, levels of processing, the single- versus multiple-systems debate, and which classic effects replicate
- Methods of cognitive psychology How hidden mental processes are inferred from behaviour, through reaction times, computational models and levels of analysis, and the documented limits of each method
- Perception How the senses give rise to experience of objects and scenes: bottom-up and constructive theories, object recognition, predictive coding, and whether beliefs and abilities change what we see
- Problem solving How people find a way from a situation to a goal: search through a problem space, the effect of expertise, and whether insight is a separate process
- Reasoning How people draw conclusions from premises: mental logic, mental models, probabilistic and dual-process accounts, and the dispute over what counts as correct reasoning
- Replicability and generality How well cognitive findings replicate, why cognitive effects fare better than social ones, the dispute over the Open Science Collaboration estimate, and how far findings from Western samples generalise
- Working memory The small, temporary memory used for the task at hand: rival models, the 'magical number four', and the dispute between item limits and continuous resources