2026-08-28·by Sijie Wang#node#cognitive-science

cognitive-science

The interdiscipline founded to study minds and machines with one vocabulary (psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy). This wiki family holds its settled experimental record; the working collection and open threads stay in raw/cognitive-science/.

The confabulation cluster — how humans perform inference on their own behavior (abduction run unchecked, its output entered as observation):

  • telling-more-than-we-can-know — Nisbett & Wilson 1977: the causes of one's own behavior are not introspectively accessible; reports are theory-fitting, accurate only by coincidence
  • left-brain-interpreter — Gazzaniga: a dedicated module weaves whatever it can see into one coherent first-person narrative, after the fact
  • choice-blindness — Johansson 2005: the filled-in material passes as one's own genuine reasons, indistinguishable from real ones

The effects record (reclassified 2026-08-05 from the marketing communication map, where it was collected before this family existed — each note keeps its marketing transfer section, but the science lives here and marketing links in):

Attention & memory: mere-exposure · processing-fluency · picture-superiority · serial-position · von-restorff-effect · zeigarnik-effect · peak-end-rule

Preference & decision: prospect-theory-loss-aversion · hyperbolic-discounting · loewenstein-information-gap · berlyne-arousal-curve

Attitude & motivation: cognitive-dissonance · reactance

Learning: rescorla-wagner — ΔV = αβ(λ − ΣV), learning as prediction error

Sibling discipline: cybernetics. Consumers link in from harness research (agent cognition) and marketing (audience cognition); the science owns itself.