The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 2,888 atoms across 3 types and 2 molecules
There exists a privileged 'basic level' of categorization (e.g., 'chair' rather than 'furniture' or 'desk chair') where categories maximize information gain while minimizing cognitive effort.
The level of abstraction at which you construe a situation (high-level why versus low-level how) changes what features appear relevant and what actions feel immediately available.
The time required to make a decision increases logarithmically with the number of equally-probable options presented (Hick-Hyman Law).
All demonstrative knowledge ultimately rests on indemonstrable first principles that cannot themselves be proven through demonstration.
Human perception automatically organizes individual elements into intermediate-level perceptual clusters to reduce cognitive complexity before conscious processing.
The human brain automatically segments continuous experience into discrete, nested hierarchical events with boundaries determined by changes in goals, locations, and activity patterns.
Concepts are grounded in sensorimotor simulations within specific situated contexts rather than abstract, context-free definitions stored as symbolic propositions.
Cognitive development occurs through equilibration—the resolution of tension between existing schemas and new experience via assimilation (fitting new information to existing schemas) or accommodation (modifying schemas when assimilation fails sufficiently to produce cognitive disequilibrium).
Human conceptual structure is a flexible context-dependent system that can simultaneously organize entities along multiple dimensions and construct ad hoc categories on the fly to serve current goals, cutting across stable taxonomies.
Agents are systems defined by perceiving their environment and acting upon it to achieve goals.
Human memory under stress and cognitive load is unreliable for executing intended behaviors.
Measurement of behavior changes the behavior being measured.
Simple decision rules using less information can outperform complex analytical models in uncertain environments with limited data.
Knowledge that exists only in tacit form degrades without detection and cannot be systematically improved.
Mental rehearsal activates the same neural circuits used during actual task execution.
People interpret failure as either evidence about their fundamental capabilities or as information about what to try next, and this interpretation predicts measurably different outcomes.
The performance of an agent is bounded by the accuracy of its world model regardless of the sophistication of its decision-making process.
Losses loom larger than equivalent gains in human psychology.
You can design your own cognitive processes rather than simply running on inherited defaults.
Behavior requires an initiating signal to occur at a specific moment rather than theoretically at some point.
Behavior is a function of both the person and their environment.
Event-based prospective memory is easier and more reliable than time-based prospective memory because the environment itself provides the retrieval cue.
Signal detection involves independent dimensions of sensitivity and specificity.
Emotions manifest as physiological changes in the body (somatic markers) that occur before conscious emotional experience.