Research-led explanations of human capacity, learning and technological change. Start with the foundations, then follow the evidence and related ideas as the Learning Hub grows.
A friend describes a tense exchange at work. You may feel an echo of the distress, infer why the colleague reacted as she did, and decide what support…
How external aids redistribute memory and reasoning work, when they help, and what users must still understand or verify.
Cognitive reappraisal changes emotional impact by changing how a situation is interpreted. It is one of the best-studied emotion-regulation strategies, but its usefulness depends on plausibility, timing, context, cognitive resources and what the person is trying to accomplish.
How to work with meaning without turning every difficult reality into a thought problem
Cognitive reflection is the tendency and ability to notice when an intuitive answer may be wrong, inhibit it, and engage further reasoning. It is related to analytic thinking, numeracy and rationality, but it is not identical to any of them and should not be reduced to performance on one short test.
The Cognitive Reflection Test is a brief performance measure built around questions that invite an intuitive but incorrect response. It can reveal a tendency to reconsider an initially compelling answer, but it is also shaped by numeracy, item familiarity, test format and task knowledge, so it should never be treated as a pure measure of rationality or reflective character.
Confidence judgments are explicit estimates of how likely a decision, memory or answer is to be correct. They are central tools in metacognition research, but confidence is an inference, not a truth signal, and the act of asking for it can sometimes change performance.
Confidence ratings ask people to report how likely they think a judgment is to be correct. Calibration asks how those reports correspond to actual outcomes. The method can reveal overconfidence, underconfidence and discrimination between correct and incorrect decisions, but confidence is task-dependent, scale-dependent and sometimes reactive.
Confirmation bias names a family of tendencies to seek, interpret, remember or test information in ways that favour an existing belief, expectation or hypothesis. It is real, heterogeneous and highly context dependent, not a diagnosis that explains every disagreement or error.
Consciousness concerns subjective experience, but its states, contents and reports require different measures.