The art of thinking · Glossary
Cognitive psychology for technical communication glossary
Definitions of the findings and models of cognitive psychology that explain how people take in and use technical information — perception and attention, working and long-term memory, schemas, reading comprehension and the situation model, cognitive load, judgment, situation awareness and the kinds of human error. Every entry names the researchers and the evidence behind a model, states its limits and marks popular claims that the research does not support. The entries describe how the mind works; what documentation does with that knowledge is defined in the glossary Applied cognitive psychology for information use.
1 · Foundations
Activity theory
German: Tätigkeitstheorie
Activity theory is a framework from cultural-historical psychology that analyzes human action as purposeful activity mediated by tools and signs and embedded in a community, its rules and its division of labor; it goes back to Lev Vygotsky and Aleksei Leontiev and was extended by Yrjö Engeström.
Cognitive psychology · Work psychology · Human factors
Definition and examplesMetacognition
German: Metakognition
In cognitive psychology, metacognition is knowledge about and regulation of one’s own cognition — judging what one knows, how well one understands something and whether a strategy is working, and adjusting accordingly; the term was established by the developmental psychologist John H. Flavell.
Cognitive psychology · Learning
Definition and examples
2 · Perception and attention
4 · Comprehension and mental representation
Given–new contract
In psycholinguistics, the given–new contract is Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Haviland’s account of comprehension in which readers expect each sentence to link new information to information already given; when the link is missing, they must build a bridging inference, which costs time and can fail.
Cognitive psychology · Reading comprehension · Linguistics
Definition and examplesIllusion of explanatory depth
In cognitive psychology, the illusion of explanatory depth is the tendency of people to believe they understand how something works — a zipper, a flush toilet, a policy — in far more detail than they do, until they try to explain it step by step; it was demonstrated by Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil in 2002.
Cognitive psychology · Metacognition
Definition and examplesPrototype theory
German: Prototypentheorie
In cognitive psychology, prototype theory holds that people represent many categories by their most typical members or features rather than by strict definitions, so that membership is graded — a robin is a “better” bird than a penguin; it was developed by Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s.
Cognitive psychology · Categorization
Definition and examples
6 · Judgment, action and error
Action regulation theory
German: Handlungsregulationstheorie
In work psychology, action regulation theory describes goal-directed work as a hierarchically organized cycle of setting goals, orienting, planning, executing and processing feedback, regulated on levels from automatic sensorimotor skills to conscious intellectual control; it was developed mainly in German work psychology by Winfried Hacker and Walter Volpert.
Cognitive psychology · Work psychology · Human factors
Definition and examplesBounded rationality
German: begrenzte Rationalität
Bounded rationality is Herbert A. Simon’s concept that human decision makers are rational within the limits of the information they have, their cognitive capacity and the time available, and therefore look for solutions that are good enough rather than optimal.
Cognitive psychology · Judgment · Decision making
Definition and examplesCurse of knowledge
German: Fluch des Wissens
In cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, the curse of knowledge is the difficulty people have in imagining what it is like not to know something they know, so that they overestimate what others know and underestimate how hard their explanations are to follow; the term comes from Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber (1989).
Cognitive psychology · Judgment
Definition and examplesDual-process theory
In cognitive psychology, dual-process theories distinguish two kinds of thinking: fast, automatic, intuitive processing (Type 1, often called System 1) and slow, deliberate, effortful processing that draws on working memory (Type 2, System 2).
Cognitive psychology · Judgment
Definition and examplesMeans–end analysis
German: Mittel-Ziel-Analyse
In cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, means–end analysis is a problem-solving strategy in which the solver compares the current state with the goal state, selects an operator that reduces the most important difference, and sets subgoals when that operator can’t yet be applied; it was described by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon.
Cognitive psychology · Problem solving
Definition and examplesNormalization of deviance
German: Normalisierung der Abweichung
In organizational sociology, normalization of deviance is the gradual process by which a group or organization comes to treat a departure from a technical, procedural or safety standard as acceptable and normal, because the departure has been repeated without visible harm. Each accepted anomaly becomes the baseline against which the next one is judged, so the band of what counts as a tolerable signal of danger widens over time. The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the term in her 1996 study of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger accident, where repeated O-ring erosion was reinterpreted as an expected characteristic of the booster rather than as a warning. The concept describes culturally sanctioned reinterpretation of risk inside an organization, not knowing misconduct by individuals.
organizational sociology · safety culture · risk perception · error and violation · decision making
Definition and examplesSensemaking
In organizational and work psychology, sensemaking is the ongoing process by which people turn an ambiguous, unexpected or confusing situation into an account they can act on: they notice and bracket cues, label them, build a plausible story and test that story through action. The concept was developed by Karl E. Weick, who analyzed its breakdown in the 1949 Mann Gulch fire and set out seven properties of organizational sensemaking in his 1995 book — identity, retrospect, enactment, social contact, ongoing events, extracted cues and plausibility. A core claim of the perspective is that sensemaking runs on plausibility rather than accuracy, because an account only has to be good enough to support the next action. Related work in naturalistic decision making models the same process as a cycle between data and frames.
sensemaking · work psychology · judgment · uncertainty · crisis response
Definition and examples
How to read this pool
Entries, context cards and transitional topics
The art of thinking explains ways of thinking — where a method comes from, what it asks of you and how it was adapted later. You meet four kinds of content here, each with its own job:
- Glossary entry
- Defines one concept or method of thinking: its origin, an example and how it relates to neighboring ideas. “X vs. Y” sections set two methods side by side.
- Context card of the art of thinking
- A short, self-contained answer to one question about a way of thinking — its lineage, its steps, its limits. These cards are listed on The art of thinking only.
- Transitional topicBridges both pools
- A context card that bridges both pools: it shows how a way of thinking was adapted into documentation, analysis or quality practice. It sits with the reference context cards and is marked as transitional wherever it appears.
- Reference entry or context card
- Belongs to the Glossary & Norms Space on regulation, norms and engineering. Entries here link to one only where a method is also an established tool of documentation or quality work, such as the five whys or a user’s mental model.
Definitions follow the cited philosophical and historical sources — primary texts, their standard translations and reference works such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — and, for cognitive psychology, the published research and its reviews, with the state of the evidence named in each entry. They are paraphrased, not quoted, unless a passage is marked as a quotation, and sayings that cannot be traced to a source stay attributed. Examples, comparisons and the notes on how a method was adapted are editorial commentary by knowledge.aitechdoc.world. None of these entries is a norm, a standard or a legal requirement, and applying one never replaces a method that a standard or a law requires.