The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 2,888 atoms across 3 types and 2 molecules
Human focused attention and deliberate cognitive processing draw from a finite biological resource that depletes with sustained use across all acts of executive function (decision-making, self-control, effortful processing) and cannot be restored through willpower alone, requiring specific recovery conditions including rest, nature exposure, or low-demand automatic processing.
Attention is capacity-limited such that focus on selected stimuli creates perceptual blindness to unattended information, even when that information is salient and within the sensory field; conscious perception requires directed attention as a necessary precondition.
Goals function as perceptual filters that determine relevance by defining signal-detection criteria before information reaches conscious awareness, making relevance a goal-relative property rather than an intrinsic feature of information.
Human visual perception processes global structure before local details.