Concepts
The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types
Encoding Depth Determines Retention
Memory encoding depth, determined by the degree of elaborative processing and integration with existing knowledge structures, directly determines long-term retention and retrievability.
Emotional Hijacking of Judgment
The amygdala evaluates emotional significance of stimuli before conscious awareness, and humans systematically use these pre-conscious emotional evaluations as heuristic substitutes for complex cognitive judgments, producing systematic distortions in probability and severity assessments.
Perceptual Plasticity Through Training
Experience and cultural training shape perceptual processing itself at preconscious levels, enabling the system to make distinctions it previously could not make and causing people from different backgrounds to literally perceive different features of objectively identical stimuli.
Systematic Overconfidence Taxonomy
Humans exhibit systematic overconfidence across domains, with subjective confidence consistently exceeding objective accuracy in three distinct forms—overestimation of absolute performance, overplacement relative to others, and overprecision of confidence intervals—that behave differently across task difficulty levels.
Emotion as Systematic Cognitive Modulator
Emotional states systematically distort perception and judgment in specific, predictable directions (fear increases perceived uncertainty and threat while decreasing control; anger does the opposite), serving as necessary somatic markers that guide attention and activate state-dependent memory networks rather than mere sources of error.
Availability Heuristic Mechanism
People judge frequency and probability based on the subjective ease of mentally retrieving examples rather than the content count of retrieved instances, using retrieval fluency as a proxy for actual frequency in the world.
Glucose-Cognition Dependency Threshold
The brain consumes approximately 20% of resting metabolic energy primarily as glucose, and blood glucose below approximately 54 mg/dL (3.0 mmol/L) consistently impairs cognitive function across attention, working memory, processing speed, executive function, and spatial reasoning.
Natural Frequency Format Advantage
Natural frequency representations of statistical information produce dramatically better Bayesian reasoning than conditional probability representations because frequency tracking matches evolutionarily older cognitive mechanisms.
Domain-Specific Calibration Development
Calibration develops from domain-specific feedback loops that provide rapid, unambiguous outcome information after predictions, and does not transfer automatically across domains.
Meaning as Receiver Construction
Meaning is constructed by receivers using their own mental models rather than transmitted intact from senders, because information contains no inherent meaning—meaning emerges from the interaction between information and context.
Bias Blind Spot Asymmetry
Human observers systematically fail to detect cognitive biases and behavioral patterns in their own judgment while readily identifying them in others (the bias blind spot), because self-evaluation relies on introspection while other-evaluation relies on observable behavior.
Culture Shapes Fundamental Cognition
Cultural context shapes perception, attention allocation, and cognitive processing at a fundamental level, not merely attitudes, preferences, or higher-level reasoning.
Externalization Exposes Hidden Structure
Externalizing thought processes—through writing, explaining, or step-by-step articulation—exposes gaps, logical jumps, and unstated assumptions that remain concealed in internal processing, converting tacit knowledge into explicit, transferable form.
Schemas as Knowledge Organization Structures
Schemas are cognitive structures that organize knowledge at all levels of abstraction by specifying relationships between concepts and guiding information processing.
Automaticity Without Conscious Control
Automatic cognitive processes operate without conscious awareness, voluntary control, or deliberate initiation.
Graded Category Membership Structure
Categories have internal structure with graded membership along a spectrum of typicality rather than binary definitional boundaries.
Belief Perseverance Against Contradictory Evidence
Cognitive systems preferentially maintain existing beliefs and interpretive frameworks even when confronted with contradictory evidence or when the original evidentiary basis is explicitly eliminated.
Expertise as Domain-Specific Schema Organization
Expertise fundamentally consists of accumulated and organized domain-specific schemas rather than superior general processing capacity, and expert knowledge structures do not automatically transfer across domains.
Environmental Installation of Early Schemas
Early cognitive schemas are installed by environmental input during critical developmental periods rather than being self-generated or innately specified in detail.
Cultural Transmission Through Shared Intentionality
Cultural learning enables humans to transmit cognitive schemas across generations through shared intentionality—the uniquely human capacity for collaborative attention and mutual understanding of communicative intent.
Abstraction Necessarily Discards Information
Abstraction necessarily discards information from the reality it represents, retaining only selected features deemed relevant while eliminating detail.
No Direct Access to Reality
No human has direct access to reality; all knowledge is mediated through neurological processing and linguistic abstraction layers that filter and structure experience.
Structural Correspondence in Mental Models
Mental models have structural correspondence (isomorphism) to the situations they represent, with relationships between model elements mapping onto relationships between real-world elements.
Brain as Hierarchical Prediction Machine
The brain operates as a hierarchical prediction machine that continuously generates top-down predictions about expected sensory input and propagates only prediction errors upward for model updating.