This effect was studied over the 6 presidential elections of the United States between 1972 and 1996, and it was found that the opinion differential between the candidates changed more before and after the election than the opinion differential of non-voters. In addition, elections where the voter had a favorable attitude toward both candidates, making the choice more difficult, had the opinion differential of the candidates change more dramatically than those who only had a favorable opinion of one candidate. What wasn't studied were the cognitive dissonance effects in cases where the person had unfavorable attitudes toward both candidates. The 2016 U.S. election held historically high unfavorable ratings for both candidates.


Cognitive dissonance theory of communication was initially advanced by American psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1960s. Festinger theorized that cognitive dissonance usually arises when a person holds two or more incompatible beliefs simultaneously. This is a normal occurrence since people encounter different situations that invoke conflicting thought sequences. This conflict results in a psychological discomfort. According to Festinger, people experiencing a thought conflict try to reduce the psychological discomfort by attempting to achieve an emotional equilibrium. This equilibrium is achieved in three main ways. First, the person may downplay the importance of the dissonant thought. Second, the person may attempt to outweigh the dissonant thought with consonant thoughts. Lastly, the person may incorporate the dissonant thought into their current belief system.


Dissonance plays an important role in persuasion. To persuade people, you must cause them to experience dissonance, and then offer your proposal as a way to resolve the discomfort. Although there is no guarantee your audience will change their minds, the theory maintains that without dissonance, there can be no persuasion. Without a feeling of discomfort, people are not motivated to change. Similarly, it is the feeling of discomfort which motivates people to perform selective exposure (i.e., avoiding disconfirming information) as a dissonance-reduction strategy.


It is hypothesized that introducing cognitive dissonance into machine learning may be able to assist in the long-term aim of developing 'creative autonomy' on the part of agents, including in multi-agent systems (such as games), and ultimately to the development of 'strong' forms of artificial intelligence, including artificial general intelligence.


In "Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena" (1967), the social psychologist Daryl Bem proposed the self-perception theory whereby people do not think much about their attitudes, even when engaged in a conflict with another person. The Theory of Self-perception proposes that people develop attitudes by observing their own behaviour, and concludes that their attitudes caused the behaviour observed by self-perception; especially true when internal cues either are ambiguous or weak. Therefore, the person is in the same position as an observer who must rely upon external cues to infer their inner state of mind. Self-perception theory proposes that people adopt attitudes without access to their states of mood and cognition.


As such, the experimental subjects of the Festinger and Carlsmith study ("Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance", 1959) inferred their mental attitudes from their own behaviour. When the subject-participants were asked: "Did you find the task interesting?", the participants decided that they must have found the task interesting, because that is what they told the questioner. Their replies suggested that the participants who were paid twenty dollars had an external incentive to adopt that positive attitude, and likely perceived the twenty dollars as the reason for saying the task was interesting, rather than saying the task actually was interesting.


The theory of self-perception (Bem) and the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger) make identical predictions, but only the theory of cognitive dissonance predicts the presence of unpleasant arousal, of psychological distress, which were verified in laboratory experiments.


In "The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: A Current Perspective" (Aronson, Berkowitz, 1969), Elliot Aronson linked cognitive dissonance to the self-concept: That mental stress arises when the conflicts among cognitions threatens the person's positive self-image. This reinterpretation of the original Festinger and Carlsmith study, using the induced-compliance paradigm, proposed that the dissonance was between the cognitions "I am an honest person." and "I lied about finding the task interesting."


The study "Cognitive Dissonance: Private Ratiocination or Public Spectacle?" (Tedeschi, Schlenker, etc. 1971) reported that maintaining cognitive consistency, rather than protecting a private self-concept, is how a person protects their public self-image. Moreover, the results reported in the study "I'm No Longer Torn After Choice: How Explicit Choices Implicitly Shape Preferences of Odors" (2010) contradict such an explanation, by showing the occurrence of revaluation of material items, after the person chose and decided, even after having forgotten the choice.


Fritz Heider proposed a motivational theory of attitudinal change that derives from the idea that humans are driven to establish and maintain psychological balance. The driving force for this balance is known as the "consistency motive", which is an urge to maintain one's values and beliefs consistent over time. Heider's conception of psychological balance has been used in theoretical models measuring cognitive dissonance.


According to balance theory, there are three interacting elements: (1) the self (P), (2) another person (O), and (3) an element (X). These are each positioned at one vertex of a triangle and share two relations:


Under balance theory, human beings seek a balanced state of relations among the three positions. This can take the form of three positives or two negatives and one positive:


People also avoid unbalanced states of relations, such as three negatives or two positives and one negative:


In the study "On the Measurement of the Utility of Public Works" (1969), Jules Dupuit reported that behaviors and cognitions can be understood from an economic perspective, wherein people engage in the systematic processing of comparing the costs and benefits of a decision. The psychological process of cost-benefit comparisons helps the person to assess and justify the feasibility (spending money) of an economic decision, and is the basis for determining if the benefit outweighs the cost, and to what extent. Moreover, although the method of cost-benefit analysis functions in economic circumstances, men and women remain psychologically inefficient at comparing the costs against the benefits of their economic decision.


E. Tory Higgins proposed that people have three selves, to which they compare themselves:


When these self-guides are contradictory psychological distress (cognitive dissonance) results. People are motivated to reduce self-discrepancy (the gap between two self-guides).


During the 1980s, Cooper and Fazio argued that dissonance was caused by aversive consequences, rather than inconsistency. According to this interpretation, the belief that lying is wrong and hurtful, not the inconsistency between cognitions, is what makes people feel bad. Subsequent research, however, found that people experience dissonance even when they feel they have not done anything wrong. For example, Harmon-Jones and colleagues showed that people experience dissonance even when the consequences of their statements are beneficial—as when they convince sexually active students to use condoms, when they, themselves are not using condoms.


In the study "How Choice Affects and Reflects Preferences: Revisiting the Free-choice Paradigm" (Chen, Risen, 2010) the researchers criticized the free-choice paradigm as invalid, because the rank-choice-rank method is inaccurate for the study of cognitive dissonance. That the designing of research-models relies upon the assumption that, if the experimental subject rates options differently in the second survey, then the attitudes of the subject towards the options have changed. That there are other reasons why an experimental subject might achieve different rankings in the second survey; perhaps the subjects were indifferent between choices.


Although the results of some follow-up studies (e.g. "Do Choices Affect Preferences? Some Doubts and New Evidence", 2013) presented evidence of the unreliability of the rank-choice-rank method, the results of studies such as "Neural Correlates of Cognitive Dissonance and Choice-induced Preference Change" (2010) have not found the Choice-Rank-Choice method to be invalid, and indicate that making a choice can change the preferences of a person.


Festinger's original theory did not seek to explain how dissonance works. Why is inconsistency so aversive? The action–motivation model seeks to answer this question. It proposes that inconsistencies in a person's cognition cause mental stress, because psychological inconsistency interferes with the person's functioning in the real world. Among the ways for coping, the person can choose to exercise a behavior that is inconsistent with their current attitude (a belief, an ideal, a value system), but later try to alter that belief to be consonant with a current behavior; the cognitive dissonance occurs when the person's cognition does not match the action taken. If the person changes the current attitude, after the dissonance occurs, he or she then is obligated to commit to that course of behavior.


Cognitive dissonance produces a state of negative affect, which motivates the person to reconsider the causative behavior in order to resolve the psychological inconsistency that caused the mental stress. As the afflicted person works towards a behavioral commitment, the motivational process then is activated in the left frontal cortex of the brain.


Technological advances are allowing psychologists to study the biomechanics of cognitive dissonance.


The study "Neural Activity Predicts Attitude Change in Cognitive Dissonance" (Van Veen, Krug, etc., 2009) identified the neural bases of cognitive dissonance with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); the neural scans of the participants replicated the basic findings of the induced-compliance paradigm. When in the fMRI scanner, some of the study participants argued that the uncomfortable, mechanical environment of the MRI machine nevertheless was a pleasant experience for them; some participants, from an experimental group, said they enjoyed the mechanical environment of the fMRI scanner more than did the control-group participants (paid actors) who argued about the uncomfortable experimental environment.


The results of the neural scan experiment support the original theory of Cognitive Dissonance proposed by Festinger in 1957; and also support the psychological conflict theory, whereby the anterior cingulate functions, in counter-attitudinal response, to activate the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insular cortex; the degree of activation of said regions of the brain is predicted by the degree of change in the psychological attitude of the person.


As an application of the free-choice paradigm, the study "How Choice Reveals and Shapes Expected Hedonic Outcome" (2009) indicates that after making a choice, neural activity in the striatum changes to reflect the person's new evaluation of the choice-object; neural activity increased if the object was chosen, neural activity decreased if the object was rejected. Moreover, studies such as "The Neural Basis of Rationalization: Cognitive Dissonance Reduction During Decision-making" (2010) and "How Choice Modifies Preference: Neural Correlates of Choice Justification" (2011) confirm the neural bases of the psychology of cognitive dissonance.


"The Neural Basis of Rationalization: Cognitive Dissonance Reduction During Decision-making" (Jarcho, Berkman, Lieberman, 2010) applied the free-choice paradigm to fMRI examination of the brain's decision-making process whilst the study participant actively tried to reduce cognitive dissonance. The results indicated that the active reduction of psychological dissonance increased neural activity in the right-inferior frontal gyrus, in the medial fronto-parietal region, and in the ventral striatum, and that neural activity decreased in the anterior insula. That the neural activities of rationalization occur in seconds, without conscious deliberation on the part of the person; and that the brain engages in emotional responses whilst effecting decisions.


The results reported in "The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance: Evidence from Children and Monkeys" (Egan, Santos, Bloom, 2007) indicated that there might be evolutionary force behind the reduction of cognitive dissonance in the actions of pre-school-age children and Capuchin monkeys when offered a choice between two like options, decals and candies. The groups then were offered a new choice, between the choice-object not chosen and a novel choice-object that was as attractive as the first object. The resulting choices of the human and simian subjects concorded with the theory of cognitive dissonance when the children and the monkeys each chose the novel choice-object instead of the choice-object not chosen in the first selection, despite every object having the same value.


The hypothesis of "An Action-based Model of Cognitive-dissonance Processes" (Harmon-Jones, Levy, 2015) proposed that psychological dissonance occurs consequent to the stimulation of thoughts that interfere with a goal-driven behavior. Researchers mapped the neural activity of the participant when performing tasks that provoked psychological stress when engaged in contradictory behaviors. A participant read aloud the printed name of a color. To test for the occurrence of cognitive dissonance, the name of the color was printed in a color different than the word read aloud by the participant. As a result, the participants experienced increased neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex when the experimental exercises provoked psychological dissonance.


Artificial neural network models of cognition provide methods for integrating the results of empirical research about cognitive dissonance and attitudes into a single model that explains the formation of psychological attitudes and the mechanisms to change such attitudes. Among the artificial neural-network models that predict how cognitive dissonance might influence a person's attitudes and behavior, are:


There are some that are skeptical of the idea. Charles G. Lord wrote a paper on whether or not the theory of cognitive dissonance was not tested enough and if it was a mistake to accept it into theory. He claimed that the theorist did not take into account all the factors and came to a conclusion without looking at all the angles.


In typography, a bouma ( ) is the shape of a cluster of letters, often a whole word. It is a reduction of "Bouma-shape", which was probably first used in Paul Saenger's 1997 book "Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading", although Saenger himself attributes it to Insup & Maurice Martin Taylor. Its origin is in reference to hypotheses by the prominent vision researcher Herman Bouma, who studied the shapes and confusability of letters and letter strings.


Some typographers believe that, when reading, people can recognize words by deciphering boumas, not just individual letters, or that the shape of the word is related to readability and/or legibility. The claim is that this is a natural strategy for increasing reading efficiency. However, considerable study and experimentation by cognitive psychologists led to their general acceptance of a different, and largely contradictory, theory by the end of the 1980s: parallel letterwise recognition. Since 2000, parallel letterwise recognition has been more evangelized to typographers by Microsoft's Dr Kevin Larson, via conference presentations and a widely read article. Nonetheless, ongoing research (starting from 2009) often supports the bouma model of reading.


Intuition's effect on decision-making is distinct from insight, which requires time to mature. A month spent pondering a math problem may lead to a gradual understanding of the answer, even if one does not know where that understanding came from. Intuition, in contrast, is a more instantaneous, immediate understanding upon first being confronted with the math problem. Intuition is also distinct from implicit knowledge and learning, which inform intuition but are separate concepts. Intuition is the mechanism by which implicit knowledge is made available during an instance of decision-making.


Traditional research often points to the role of heuristics in helping people make “intuitive” decisions. Those following the heuristics-and-biases school of thought developed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman believe that intuitive judgments are derived from an “informal and unstructured mode of reasoning” that ultimately does not include any methodical calculation. Tversky and Kahneman identify availability, representativeness, and anchoring/adjustment as three heuristics that influence many intuitive judgments made under uncertain conditions.


The heuristics-and-biases approach looks at patterns of biased judgments to distinguish heuristics from normative reasoning processes. Early studies supporting this approach associated each heuristic with a set of biases. These biases were “departures from the normative rational theory” and helped identify the underlying heuristics. Use of the availability heuristic, for example, leads to error whenever the memory retrieved is a biased recollection of actual frequency. This can be attributed to an individual's tendency to remember dramatic cases. Heuristic processes are quick intuitive responses to basic questions such as frequency.


Intuitive decision-making can be contrasted with deliberative decision-making, which is based on cognitive factors like beliefs, arguments, and reasons, commonly referred to as one's explicit knowledge. Intuitive decision-making is based on implicit knowledge relayed to the conscious mind at the point of decision through affect or unconscious cognition. Some studies also suggest that intuitive decision-making relies more on the mind's parallel processing functions, while deliberative decision-making relies more on sequential processing.


Prevalence of intuitive judgment and measurement of use.


Although people use intuitive and deliberative decision-making modes interchangeably, individuals value the decisions they make more when they are allowed to make them using their preferred style. This specific kind of regulatory fit is referred to as decisional fit. The emotions people experience after a decision is made tend to be more pleasant when the preferred style is used, regardless of the decision outcome. Some studies suggest that the mood with which the subject enters the decision-making process can also affect the style they choose to employ: sad people tend to be more deliberative, while people in a happy mood rely more on intuition.


The Preference for Intuition and Deliberation Scale developed by Coralie Bestch in 2004 measures propensity toward intuitiveness. The scale defines preference for intuition as tendency to use affect (“gut-feel”) as a basis for decision-making instead of cognition. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is also sometimes used.


Researchers have also explored the efficacy of intuitive judgments and the debate on the function of intuition versus analysis in decisions that require specific expertise, as in management of organizations. In this context, intuition is interpreted as an “unconscious expertise” rather than a traditionally purely heuristic response. Research suggests that this kind of intuition is based on a “broad constellation of past experiences, knowledge, skills, perceptions and feelings.” The efficacy of intuitive decision-making in the management environment is largely dependent on the decision context and decision maker's expertise.


Traditional literature attributes the role of judgment processes in risk perception and decision-making to cognition rather than emotion. However, more recent studies suggest a link between emotion and cognition as it relates to decision-making in high-risk environments. Studies of decision-making in high-risk environments suggest that individuals who self-identify as intuitive decision-makers tend to make faster decisions that imply greater deviation from risk neutrality than those who prefer the deliberative style. For example, risk-averse intuitive decision-makers will choose to not participate in a dangerous event more quickly than deliberative decision-makers, but will choose not to participate in more instances than their deliberative counterparts.


Strategic decisions are usually made by the top management in the organizations. Usually strategic decisions also effect on the future of the organization. Rationality has been the guideline and also justified way to make decisions because they are based on facts. Intuition in strategic decision making is less examined and for example can be depending on a case be described as managers know-how, expertise or just a gut feeling, hunch.


In psychology, a dual process theory provides an account of how thought can arise in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes. Often, the two processes consist of an implicit (automatic), unconscious process and an explicit (controlled), conscious process. Verbalized explicit processes or attitudes and actions may change with persuasion or education; though implicit process or attitudes usually take a long amount of time to change with the forming of new habits. Dual process theories can be found in social, personality, cognitive, and clinical psychology. It has also been linked with economics via prospect theory and behavioral economics, and increasingly in sociology through cultural analysis.


The foundations of dual process theory likely comes from William James. He believed that there were two different kinds of thinking: associative and true reasoning. James theorized that empirical thought was used for things like art and design work. For James, images and thoughts would come to mind of past experiences, providing ideas of comparison or abstractions. He claimed that associative knowledge was only from past experiences describing it as "only reproductive". James believed that true reasoning could enable overcoming “unprecedented situations” just as a map could enable navigating past obstacles.


There are various dual process theories that were produced after William James's work. Dual process models are very common in the study of social psychological variables, such as attitude change. Examples include Petty and Cacioppo's elaboration likelihood model (explained below) and Chaiken's heuristic systematic model. According to these models, persuasion may occur after either intense scrutiny or extremely superficial thinking. In cognitive psychology, attention and working memory have also been conceptualized as relying on two distinct processes. Whether the focus be on social psychology or cognitive psychology, there are many examples of dual process theories produced throughout the past. The following just show a glimpse into the variety that can be found.


Peter Wason and Jonathan Evans suggested dual process theory in 1974. In Evans' later theory, there are two distinct types of processes: heuristic processes and analytic processes. He suggested that during heuristic processes, an individual chooses which information is relevant to the current situation. Relevant information is then processed further whereas irrelevant information is not. Following the heuristic processes come analytic processes. During analytic processes, the relevant information that is chosen during the heuristic processes is then used to make judgments about the situation.


Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo proposed a dual process theory focused in the field of social psychology in 1986. Their theory is called the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In their theory, there are two different routes to persuasion in making decisions. The first route is known as the central route and this takes place when a person is thinking carefully about a situation, elaborating on the information they are given, and creating an argument. This route occurs when an individual's motivation and ability are high. The second route is known as the peripheral route and this takes place when a person is not thinking carefully about a situation and uses shortcuts to make judgments. This route occurs when an individual's motivation or ability are low.


Steven Sloman produced another interpretation on dual processing in 1996. He believed that associative reasoning takes stimuli and divides it into logical clusters of information based on statistical regularity. He proposed that how you associate is directly proportional to the similarity of past experiences, relying on temporal and similarity relations to determine reasoning rather than an underlying mechanical structure. The other reasoning process in Sloman's opinion was of the Rule-based system. The system functioned on logical structure and variables based upon rule systems to come to conclusions different from that of the associative system. He also believed that the Rule-based system had control over the associative system, though it could only suppress it. This interpretation corresponds well to earlier work on computational models of dual processes of reasoning.


Daniel Kahneman provided further interpretation by differentiating the two styles of processing more, calling them intuition and reasoning in 2003. Intuition (or system 1), similar to associative reasoning, was determined to be fast and automatic, usually with strong emotional bonds included in the reasoning process. Kahneman said that this kind of reasoning was based on formed habits and very difficult to change or manipulate. Reasoning (or system 2) was slower and much more volatile, being subject to conscious judgments and attitudes.


Fritz Strack and Roland Deutsch proposed another dual process theory focused in the field of social psychology in 2004. According to their model, there are two separate systems: the reflective system and the impulsive system. In the reflective system, decisions are made using knowledge and the information that is coming in from the situation is processed. On the other hand, in the impulsive system, decisions are made using schemes and there is little or no thought required.


Ron Sun proposed a dual-process model of learning (both implicit learning and explicit learning). The model (named CLARION) re-interpreted voluminous behavioral data in psychological studies of implicit learning and skill acquisition in general. The resulting theory is two-level and interactive, based on the idea of the interaction of one-shot explicit rule learning (i.e., explicit learning) and gradual implicit tuning through reinforcement (i.e. implicit learning), and it accounts for many previously unexplained cognitive data and phenomena based on the interaction of implicit and explicit learning.


Using a somewhat different approach, Allan Paivio has developed a dual-coding theory of information processing. According to this model, cognition involves the coordinated activity of two independent, but connected systems, a nonverbal system and a verbal system that is specialized to deal with language. The nonverbal system is hypothesized to have developed earlier in evolution. Both systems rely on different areas of the brain. Paivio has reported evidence that nonverbal, visual images are processed more efficiently and are approximately twice as memorable. Additionally, the verbal and nonverbal systems are additive, so one can improve memory by using both types of information during learning.


Dual-process accounts of reasoning postulate that there are two systems or minds in one brain. A current theory is that there are two cognitive systems underlying thinking and reasoning and that these different systems were developed through evolution. These systems are often referred to as "implicit" and "explicit" or by the more neutral "System 1" and "System 2", as coined by Keith Stanovich and Richard West.


The systems have multiple names by which they can be called, as well as many different properties.


One takeaway from the psychological research on dual process theory is that our System 1 (intuition) is more accurate in areas where we’ve gathered a lot of data with reliable and fast feedback, like social dynamics.


System 2 is evolutionarily recent and specific to humans. It is also known as the "explicit" system, the "rule-based" system, the "rational" system, or the "analytic" system. It performs the more slow and sequential thinking. It is domain-general, performed in the central working memory system. Because of this, it has a limited capacity and is slower than System 1 which correlates it with general intelligence. It is known as the rational system because it reasons according to logical standards. Some overall properties associated with System 2 are that it is rule-based, analytic, controlled, demanding of cognitive capacity, and slow.


Unconscious thought theory is the counterintuitive and contested view that the unconscious mind is adapted to highly complex decision making. Where most dual system models define complex reasoning as the domain of effortful conscious thought, UTT argues complex issues are best dealt with unconsciously.


Terror management theory and the dual process model.


According to psychologists Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, the dual process model, in relation to terror management theory, identifies two systems by which the brain manages fear of death: distal and proximal. Distal defenses fall under the system 1 category because it is unconscious whereas proximal defenses fall under the system 2 category because it operates with conscious thought.


Habituation can be described as decreased response to a repeated stimulus. According to Groves and Thompson, the process of habituation also mimics a dual process. The dual process theory of behavioral habituation relies on two underlying (non-behavioral) processes; depression and facilitation with the relative strength of one over the other determining whether or not habituation or sensitization is seen in the behavior. Habituation weakens the intensity of a repeated stimulus over time subconsciously. As a result, a person will give the stimulus less conscious attention over time. Conversely, sensitization subconsciously strengthens a stimulus over time, giving the stimulus more conscious attention. Though these two systems are not both conscious, they interact to help people understand their surroundings by strengthening some stimuli and diminishing others.


A belief bias is the tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they support that conclusion. Some evidence suggests that this bias results from competition between logical (System 2) and belief-based (System 1) processes during evaluation of arguments.


Studies on belief-bias effect were first designed by Jonathan Evans to create a conflict between logical reasoning and prior knowledge about the truth of conclusions. Participants are asked to evaluate syllogisms that are: valid arguments with believable conclusions, valid arguments with unbelievable conclusions, invalid arguments with believable conclusions, and invalid arguments with unbelievable conclusions. Participants are told to only agree with conclusions that logically follow from the premises given. The results suggest when the conclusion is believable, people erroneously accept invalid conclusions as valid more often than invalid arguments are accepted which support unpalatable conclusions. This is taken to suggest that System 1 beliefs are interfering with the logic of System 2.


Vinod Goel and others produced neuropsychological evidence for dual-process accounts of reasoning using fMRI studies. They provided evidence that anatomically distinct parts of the brain were responsible for the two different kinds of reasoning. They found that content-based reasoning caused left temporal hemisphere activation whereas abstract formal problem reasoning activated the parietal system. They concluded that different kinds of reasoning, depending on the semantic content, activated one of two different systems in the brain.


A similar study incorporated fMRI during a belief-bias test. They found that different mental processes were competing for control of the response to the problems given in the belief-bias test. The prefrontal cortex was critical in detecting and resolving conflicts, which are characteristic of System 2, and had already been associated with that System 2. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex, known to be associated with the more intuitive or heuristic responses of System 1, was the area in competition with the prefrontal cortex.


Matching bias is a non-logical heuristic. The matching bias is described as a tendency to use lexical content matching of the statement about which one is reasoning, to be seen as relevant information and do the opposite as well, ignore relevant information that doesn't match. It mostly affects problems with abstract content. It doesn't involve prior knowledge and beliefs but it is still seen as a System 1 heuristic that competes with the logical System 2.


Studies have shown that you can train people to inhibit matching bias which provides neuropsychological evidence for the dual-process theory of reasoning. When you compare trials before and after the training there is evidence for a forward shift in activated brain area. Pre-test results showed activation in locations along the ventral pathway and post-test results showed activation around the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate. Matching bias has also been shown to generalise to syllogistic reasoning.


Dual-process theorists claim that System 2, a general purpose reasoning system, evolved late and worked alongside the older autonomous sub-systems of System 1. The success of "Homo sapiens" lends evidence to their higher cognitive abilities above other hominids. Mithen theorizes that the increase in cognitive ability occurred 50,000 years ago when representational art, imagery, and the design of tools and artefacts are first documented. She hypothesizes that this change was due to the adaptation of System 2.


Most evolutionary psychologists do not agree with dual-process theorists. They claim that the mind is modular, and domain-specific, thus they disagree with the theory of the general reasoning ability of System 2. They have difficulty agreeing that there are two distinct ways of reasoning and that one is evolutionarily old, and the other is new. To ease this discomfort, the theory is that once System 2 evolved, it became a 'long leash' system without much genetic control which allowed humans to pursue their individual goals.


Issues with the dual-process account of reasoning.


The dual-process account of reasoning is an old theory, as noted above. But according to Evans it has adapted itself from the old, logicist paradigm, to the new theories that apply to other kinds of reasoning as well. And the theory seems more influential now than in the past which is questionable. Evans outlined 5 "fallacies":


Another argument against dual-process accounts for reasoning which was outlined by Osman is that the proposed dichotomy of System 1 and System 2 does not adequately accommodate the range of processes accomplished. Moshman proposed that there should be four possible types of processing as opposed to two. They would be implicit heuristic processing, implicit rule-based processing, explicit heuristic processing, and explicit rule-based processing. Another fine-grained division is as follows: implicit action-centered processes, implicit non-action-centered processes, explicit action-centered processes, and explicit non-action-centered processes (that is, a four-way division reflecting both the implicit-explicit distinction and the procedural-declarative distinction).


In response to the question as to whether there are dichotomous processing types, many have instead proposed a single-system framework which incorporates a continuum between implicit and explicit processes.


According to Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna's fuzzy-trace theory of memory and reasoning, people have two memory representations: verbatim and gist. Verbatim is memory for surface information (e.g. the words in this sentence) whereas gist is memory for semantic information (e.g. the meaning of this sentence).


This dual process theory posits that we encode, store, retrieve, and forget the information in these two traces of memory separately and completely independently of each other. Furthermore, the two memory traces decay at different rates: verbatim decays quickly, while gist lasts longer.


In terms of reasoning, fuzzy-trace theory posits that as we mature, we increasingly rely more on gist information over verbatim information. Evidence for this lies in framing experiments where framing effects become stronger when verbatim information (percentages) are replaced with gist descriptions. Other experiments rule out predictions of prospect theory (extended and original) as well as other current theories of judgment and decision making.


Semantic memory builds schemas and scripts. With this, semantic memory is known as the knowledge that people gain from experiencing events in the everyday world. This information is then organized into a concept that people can understand in their own way. Semantic memory relates to scripts because scripts are made through the knowledge that one gains through these everyday experiences and habituation.


Behavioral scripts that people are taught allow them to make realistic assumptions about situations, places, and people. These assumptions stem from what are known as schemas. Schemas make our environments more approachable to understand, and therefore people are able to familiarize themselves with what is around them. When people become comfortable with what they find familiar, they are more likely to remember events, people or places that obscure from their initial thought or script.


Some people may have a tendency to habituate behavioral scripts in a manner that can act to limit consciousness in a subliminal way. This can negatively influence the subconscious mind and, subsequently, can negatively affect perceptions, judgments, values, beliefs, cognition and behavior. For example, over-reliance upon behavioral scripts combined with social norms that encourage an individual to use these behavioral scripts may influence one to stereotype and develop a prejudiced attitude toward others based on socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, etc.


Some applied behavior analysts even use scripts to train new skills and 20 years of research supports script use as an effective way to build new language, social, and activity routines for adults and children with developmental disabilities. With language scripts fading, efforts are being made in an attempt to help the scripts recombine in order to approximate more natural language.


Much of the development of scripts first addresses language and how it influences what we know and understand. With language, many psychologists have used the specific study of language to develop theories about concepts and scripts. In particular, researchers recognize semantic memory development is mostly possible through verbal-linguistic stimuli. Language and memory are constantly used for people to be able to interpret what experiences or people mean to or relate to them. Here, language has influence on the scripts people use because of its relationship to semantic memory.


Depressive realism is the hypothesis developed by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson that depressed individuals make more realistic inferences than non-depressed individuals. Although depressed individuals are thought to have a negative cognitive bias that results in recurrent, negative automatic thoughts, maladaptive behaviors, and dysfunctional world beliefs, depressive realism argues not only that this negativity may reflect a more accurate appraisal of the world but also that non-depressed individuals' appraisals are positively biased.


When participants were asked to press a button and rate the control they perceived they had over whether or not a light turned on, depressed individuals made more accurate ratings of control than non-depressed individuals. Among participants asked to complete a task and rate their performance without any feedback, depressed individuals made more accurate self-ratings than non-depressed individuals. For participants asked to complete a series of tasks, given feedback on their performance after each task, and who self-rated their overall performance after completing all the tasks, depressed individuals were again more likely to give an accurate self-rating than non-depressed individuals. When asked to evaluate their performance both immediately and some time after completing a task, depressed individuals made accurate appraisals both immediately before and after time had passed.


In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of the brain, depressed patients were shown to be more accurate in their causal attributions of positive and negative social events than non-depressed participants who demonstrated a positive bias. This difference was also reflected in the differential activation of the fronto-temporal network, higher activation for non self-serving attributions in non-depressed participants and for self-serving attributions in depressed patients, and reduced coupling of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex seed region and the limbic areas when depressed patients made self-serving attributions.


When asked to rate both their performance and the performance of others, non-depressed individuals demonstrated positive bias when rating themselves but no bias when rating others. Depressed individuals conversely showed no bias when rating themselves but a positive bias when rating others.


When assessing participant thoughts in public versus private settings, the thoughts of non-depressed individuals were more optimistic in public than private, while depressed individuals were less optimistic in public.


When asked to rate their performance immediately after a task and after some time had passed, depressed individuals were more accurate when they rated themselves immediately after the task but were more negative after time had passed whereas non-depressed individuals were positive immediately after and some time after.


Although depressed individuals make accurate judgments about having no control in situations where they in fact have no control, this appraisal also carries over to situations where they do have control, suggesting that the depressed perspective is not more accurate overall.


One study suggested that in real-world settings, depressed individuals are actually less accurate and more overconfident in their predictions than their non-depressed peers. Participants' attributional accuracy may also be more related to their overall attributional style rather than the presence and severity of their depressive symptoms.


Some have argued that the evidence is not more conclusive because no standard for reality exists, the diagnoses are dubious, and the results may not apply to the real world. Because many studies rely on self-report of depressive symptoms and self-reports are known to be biased, the diagnosis of depression in these studies may not be valid, necessitating the use of other objective measures. Due to most of these studies using designs that do not necessarily approximate real-world phenomena, the external validity of the depressive realism hypothesis is unclear. There is also concern that the depressive realism effect is merely a byproduct of the depressed person being in a situation that agrees with their negative bias.


An intrusive thought is an unwelcome, involuntary thought, image, or unpleasant idea that may become an obsession, is upsetting or distressing, and can feel difficult to manage or eliminate. When such thoughts are associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), depression, body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), and sometimes attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the thoughts may become paralyzing, anxiety-provoking, or persistent. Intrusive thoughts may also be associated with episodic memory, unwanted worries or memories from OCD, post-traumatic stress disorder, other anxiety disorders, eating disorders, or psychosis. Intrusive thoughts, urges, and images are of inappropriate things at inappropriate times, and generally have aggressive, sexual, or blasphemous themes.


Many people experience the type of bad or unwanted thoughts that people with more troubling intrusive thoughts have, but most people can dismiss these thoughts. For most people, intrusive thoughts are a "fleeting annoyance". Psychologist Stanley Rachman presented a questionnaire to healthy college students and found that virtually all said they had these thoughts from time to time, including thoughts of sexual violence, sexual punishment, "unnatural" sex acts, painful sexual practices, blasphemous or obscene images, thoughts of harming elderly people or someone close to them, violence against animals or towards children, and impulsive or abusive outbursts or utterances. Such thoughts are universal among humans, and have "almost certainly always been a part of the human condition".


When intrusive thoughts occur with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), patients are less able to ignore the unpleasant thoughts and may pay undue attention to them, causing the thoughts to become more frequent and distressing. The suppression of intrusive thoughts often cause these thoughts to become more intense and persistent. The thoughts may become obsessions that are paralyzing, severe, and constantly present, these might involve such topics such as thoughts of violence, sex, or religious blasphemy to name a few examples. Distinguishing them from normal intrusive thoughts experienced by many people, the intrusive thoughts associated with OCD may be anxiety provoking, irrepressible, and persistent.


Intrusive thoughts may involve violent obsessions about hurting others or themselves. They can be related to primarily obsessional obsessive compulsive disorder. These thoughts can include harming a child; jumping from a bridge, mountain, or the top of a tall building; urges to jump in front of a train or automobile; and urges to push another in front of a train or automobile. Rachman's survey of healthy college students found that virtually all of them had intrusive thoughts from time to time, including:


These thoughts are part of being human, and need not ruin the quality of life. Treatment is available when the thoughts are associated with OCD and become persistent, severe, or distressing.


A variant of aggressive intrusive thoughts is L'appel du vide, or the call of the void. Sufferers of "L'appel du vide" generally describe the condition as manifesting in certain situations, normally as a wish or brief desire to jump from a high location.


Sexual obsession involves intrusive thoughts or images of "kissing, touching, fondling, oral sex, anal sex, intercourse, and rape" with "strangers, acquaintances, parents, children, family members, friends, coworkers, animals and religious figures", involving "heterosexual or homosexual content" with persons of any age.


Common sexual themes for intrusive thoughts for men involve “(a) having sex in a public place, (b) people I come in contact with being naked, and (c) engaging in a sexual act with someone who is unacceptable to me because they have authority over me.” While common sexual intrusive thoughts for women are (a) having sex in a public place, (b) engaging in a sexual act with someone who is unacceptable to me because they have authority over me, and (c) being sexually victimized.


Like other unwanted intrusive thoughts or images, most people have some inappropriate sexual thoughts at times, but people with OCD may attach significance to the unwanted sexual thoughts, generating anxiety and distress. The doubt that accompanies OCD leads to uncertainty regarding whether one might act on the intrusive thoughts, resulting in self-criticism or loathing.


One of the more common sexual intrusive thoughts occurs when an obsessive person doubts their sexual identity. As in the case of most sexual obsessions, sufferers may feel shame and live in isolation, finding it hard to discuss their fears, doubts, and concerns about their sexual identity.


According to Fred Penzel, a New York psychologist, some common religious obsessions and intrusive thoughts are:


Suffering can be greater and treatment complicated when intrusive thoughts involve religious implications; patients may believe the thoughts are inspired by Satan, and may fear punishment from God or have magnified shame because they perceive themselves as sinful. Symptoms can be more distressing for sufferers with strong religious convictions or beliefs.


Baer believes that blasphemous thoughts are more common in Catholics and evangelical Protestants than in other religions, whereas Jews or Muslims tend to have obsessions related more to complying with the laws and rituals of their faith, and performing the rituals perfectly. He hypothesizes that this is because what is considered inappropriate varies among cultures and religions, and intrusive thoughts torment their sufferers with whatever is considered most inappropriate in the surrounding culture.


Adults under the age of 40 seem to be the most affected by intrusive thoughts. Individuals in this age range tend to be less experienced at coping with these thoughts, and the stress and negative affect induced by them. Younger adults also tend to have stressors specific to that period of life that can be particularly challenging especially in the face of intrusive thoughts. Although, when introduced with an intrusive thought, both age groups immediately look for ways to reduce the recurrence of the thoughts.


Intrusive thoughts appear to occur at the same rate across the lifespan, however, older adults seem to be less negatively affected than younger adults. Older adults have more experience in ignoring or suppressing strong negative reactions to stress.


Intrusive thoughts are associated with OCD or OCPD, but may also occur with other conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, clinical depression, postpartum depression, and anxiety. One of these conditions is almost always present in people whose intrusive thoughts reach a clinical level of severity. A large study published in 2005 found that aggressive, sexual, and religious obsessions were broadly associated with comorbid anxiety disorders and depression. The intrusive thoughts that occur in a schizophrenic episode differ from the obsessional thoughts that occur with OCD or depression in that the intrusive thoughts of schizophrenics are false or delusional beliefs (i.e. held by the schizophrenic individual to be real and not doubted, as is typically the case with intrusive thoughts) .


The key difference between OCD and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is that the intrusive thoughts of PTSD sufferers are of content relating to traumatic events that actually happened to them, whereas OCD sufferers have thoughts of imagined catastrophes. PTSD patients with intrusive thoughts have to sort out violent, sexual, or blasphemous thoughts from memories of traumatic experiences. When patients with intrusive thoughts do not respond to treatment, physicians may suspect past physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. If a person who has experienced trauma practices looks for the positive outcomes, it is suggested they will experience less depression and higher self well-being. While a person may experience less depression for benefit finding, they may also experience an increased amount of intrusive and/or avoidant thoughts.


One study looking at women with PTSD found that intrusive thoughts were more persistent when the individual tried to cope by using avoidance-based thought regulation strategies. Their findings further support that not all coping strategies are helpful in diminishing the frequency of intrusive thoughts.


People who are clinically depressed may experience intrusive thoughts more intensely, and view them as evidence that they are worthless or sinful people. The suicidal thoughts that are common in depression must be distinguished from intrusive thoughts, because suicidal thoughts—unlike harmless sexual, aggressive, or religious thoughts—can be dangerous.


Non-depressed individuals have been shown to have a higher activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is the area of the brain that primarily functions in cognition, working memory, and planning,  while attempting to suppress intrusive thoughts. This activation decreases in people at risk of or currently diagnosed with depression. When the intrusive thoughts re-emerge, non depressed individuals also show higher activation levels in the anterior cingulate cortices, which functions in error detection, motivation, and emotional regulation, than their depressed counterparts.


Roughly 60% of depressed individuals report experiencing bodily, visual, or auditory perceptions along with their intrusive thoughts. There is a correlation with experiencing those sensations with intrusive thoughts and more intense depressive symptoms as well as the need for heavier treatment.


Unwanted thoughts by mothers about harming infants are common in postpartum depression. A 1999 study of 65 women with postpartum major depression by Katherine Wisner "et al." found the most frequent aggressive thought for women with postpartum depression was causing harm to their newborn infants. A study of 85 new parents found that 89% experienced intrusive images, for example, of the baby suffocating, having an accident, being harmed, or being kidnapped.


Some women may develop symptoms of OCD during pregnancy or the postpartum period. Postpartum OCD occurs mainly in women who may already have OCD, perhaps in a mild or undiagnosed form. Postpartum depression and OCD may be comorbid (often occurring together). And though physicians may focus more on the depressive symptoms, one study found that obsessive thoughts did accompany postpartum depression in 57% of new mothers.


Wisner found common obsessions about harming babies in mothers experiencing postpartum depression include images of the baby lying dead in a casket or being eaten by sharks; stabbing the baby; throwing the baby down the stairs; or drowning or burning the baby (as by submerging it in the bathtub in the former case or throwing it in the fire or putting it in the microwave in the latter). Baer estimates that up to 200,000 new mothers with postpartum depression each year may develop these obsessional thoughts about their babies; and because they may be reluctant to share these thoughts with a physician or family member, or suffer in silence out of fear they could be "crazy", their depression can worsen.


Intrusive fears of harming immediate children can last longer than the postpartum period. A study of 100 clinically depressed women found that 41% had obsessive fears that they might harm their child, and some were afraid to care for their children. Among non-depressed mothers, the study found 7% had thoughts of harming their child—a rate that yields an additional 280,000 non-depressed mothers in the United States with intrusive thoughts about harming their children.


Treatment for intrusive thoughts is similar to treatment for OCD. Exposure and response prevention therapy—also referred to as habituation or desensitization—is useful in treating intrusive thoughts. Mild cases can also be treated with cognitive behavioral therapy, which helps patients identify and manage the unwanted thoughts.


Exposure therapy (or exposure and response prevention) is the practice of staying in an anxiety-provoking or feared situation until the distress or anxiety diminishes. The goal is to reduce the fear reaction, learning to not react to the bad thoughts. This is the most effective way to reduce the frequency and severity of the intrusive thoughts. The goal is to be able to "expose yourself to the thing that most triggers your fear or discomfort for one to two hours at a time, without leaving the situation, or doing anything else to distract or comfort you." Exposure therapy will not completely eliminate intrusive thoughts—everyone has bad thoughts—but most patients find that it can decrease their thoughts sufficiently that intrusive thoughts no longer interfere with their lives.


Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a newer therapy than exposure therapy, available for those unable or unwilling to undergo exposure therapy. Cognitive therapy has been shown to be useful in reducing intrusive thoughts, but developing a conceptualization of the obsessions and compulsions with the patient is important. One of the strategies sometimes used in Cognitive Behavioral Theory is mindfulness exercises. These include practices such as being aware of the thoughts, accepting the thoughts without judgement for them, and “being larger than your thoughts.”


Antidepressants or antipsychotic medications may be used for more severe cases if intrusive thoughts do not respond to cognitive behavioral or exposure therapy alone. Whether the cause of intrusive thoughts is OCD, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs (a class of antidepressants) are the most commonly prescribed. Intrusive thoughts may occur in persons with Tourette syndrome (TS) who also have OCD; the obsessions in TS-related OCD are thought to respond to SSRI drugs as well.


Patients with intense intrusive thoughts that do not respond to SSRIs or other antidepressants may be prescribed typical and atypical neuroleptics including risperidone (trade name Risperdal), ziprasidone (Geodon), haloperidol (Haldol), and pimozide (Orap).


Studies suggest that therapeutic doses of inositol may be useful in the treatment of obsessive thoughts.


A 2007 study found that 78% of a clinical sample of OCD patients had intrusive images. Most people who suffer from intrusive thoughts have not identified themselves as having OCD, because they may not have what they believe to be classic symptoms of OCD, such as handwashing. Yet, epidemiological studies suggest that intrusive thoughts are the most common kind of OCD worldwide; if people in the United States with intrusive thoughts gathered, they would form the fourth-largest city in the US, following New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.


The prevalence of OCD in every culture studied is at least 2% of the population, and the majority of those have obsessions, or bad thoughts, only; this results in a conservative estimate of more than 2 million sufferers in the United States alone (as of 2000). One author estimates that one in 50 adults have OCD and about 10–20% of these have sexual obsessions. A recent study found that 25% of 293 patients with a primary diagnosis of OCD had a history of sexual obsessions.


Human Computer Interaction has a huge part in cognitive ergonomics because we are in a time period where most of life is digitalized. This created new problems and solutions. Studies show that most of the problems that happen are due to the digitalization of dynamic systems. With this it created a rise in the diversity in methods on how to process many streams of information. The changes in our socio-technical contexts adds to the stress of methods of visualization and analysis, along with the capabilities regarding cognitive perceptions by the user.


A proposed way of expanding a users effectiveness with cognitive ergonomics is to expand the interdisciplinary connects related to normal dynamics. The method behind this is to transfer the pre-existing knowledge of the various mechanics in computers into structural patterns of the cognitive space that could be used. This will work with human factors in 1.) developing an intellectual learning support system 2.) apply a interdisciplinary methodology of training. This will help the effective interaction between the person and the computer with the strengthening of critical thinking and intuition.


Some of the best practices for accessible content include:


"Cognitive task analysis" is a general term for the set of methods used to identify the mental demands and cognitive skills needed to complete a task. Frameworks like GOMS provide a formal set of methods for identifying the mental activities required by a task and an artifact, such as a desktop computer system. By identifying the sequence of mental activities of a user engaged in a task, cognitive ergonomics engineers can identify bottlenecks and critical paths that may present opportunities for improvement or risks (such as human error) that merit changes in training or system behavior. It is the whole study of what we know, how we think, and how we organize new information.


As a design philosophy, cognitive ergonomics can be applied to any area where humans interact with technology. Applications include aviation (e.g., cockpit layouts), transportation (e.g., collision avoidance), the health care system (e.g., drug bottle labelling), mobile devices, appliance interface design, product design, and nuclear power plants.


The focus of cognitive ergonomics is to be simple, clear and "easy to use" and accessible to everyone. Softwares are designed to help make better use of this. Its aim is to design icons and visual cues that are "easy" to use and function by all.


Inhibitory control, also known as response inhibition, is a cognitive process and more specifically, an executive function – that permits an individual to inhibit their impulses and natural, habitual, or dominant behavioral responses to stimuli ( prepotent responses) in order to select a more appropriate behavior that is consistent with completing their goals. Self-control is an important aspect of inhibitory control. For example, successfully suppressing the natural behavioral response to eat cake when one is craving it while dieting requires the use of inhibitory control.


The prefrontal cortex, caudate nucleus, and subthalamic nucleus are known to regulate inhibitory control cognition. Inhibitory control is impaired in both addiction and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In healthy adults and ADHD individuals, inhibitory control improves over the short term with low (therapeutic) doses of methylphenidate or amphetamine. Inhibitory control may also be improved over the long-term via consistent aerobic exercise.


An inhibitory control test is a neuropsychological test that measures an individual's ability to override their natural, habitual, or dominant behavioral response to a stimulus in order to implement more adaptive behaviors. Some of the neuropsychological tests that measure inhibitory control include the Stroop task, go/no-go task, Simon task, Flanker task, antisaccade tasks, delay of gratification tasks, and stop-signal tasks.


Females tend to have a greater basal capacity to exert inhibitory control over undesired or habitual behaviors and respond differently to modulatory environmental contextual factors relative to males. For example, listening to music tends to significantly improve the rate of response inhibition in females, but reduces the rate of response inhibition in males.


Cultural learning is made possible by a deep understanding of social cognition. Humans have the unique capacity to identify and relate to others and view them as intentional beings. Humans are able to understand that others have intentions, goals, desires, and beliefs. It is this deep understanding, this cognitive adaptation, that allows humans to learn from and with others through cultural transmission (Tomasello, 1999).


Dogs have also shown some interesting but limited abilities at social cognition in a series of studies by Hare and Tomasello (2005). Dogs have the ability to read human social cues, even to a greater extent than chimpanzees. Dogs are able to respond to human pointing, the human gaze, and subtle human nods without training. Researchers now believe that these abilities are the result of convergent evolution between humans and dogs through domestication. Research with domesticated foxes has shown that the likely mechanism for this convergent evolution was the selection of tame behavior in dogs. This finding suggests that perhaps humans had to evolve a propensity to cooperate before cultural evolution was able to take place (Hare & Tomasello, 2005).


Sociogenesis refers to collaborative inventiveness. It is the process by which two or more humans collectively interact and invent something new which could not have been developed by one individual alone, such as language and mathematics (Tomasello, 1999). Sociogenesis can occur across time, or simultaneously (Tomasello, 1999). Socigenesis across times occurs through the ratchet effect, when one individual modifies something they had previously learned through others. Over time, ideas, tools, and language advance. Simultaneous sociogenesis occurs when two or more individuals work together at the same time and develop something new.


Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2005). Human-like social skills in dogs? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 9 (9), 439-444.


Tomasello, M., Call, J., & Hare, B. (2003). Chimpanzees understand psychological states – the question is which ones and to what extent. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 7 (4), 153-156. Tomasello (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (Chapters. 1 & 2, pp. 1–55).


Lexicalization is the process of adding words, set phrases, or word patterns to a language's lexicon.


Whether or not word formation and lexicalization refer to the same process is a source of controversy within the field of linguistics. Most linguists assert that there is a distinction, but there are many ideas of what the distinction is. Lexicalization may be simple, for example borrowing a word from another language, or more involved, as in calque or loan translation, wherein a foreign phrase is translated literally, as in "marché aux puces", or in English, flea market.


Other mechanisms include compounding, abbreviation, and blending. Particularly interesting from the perspective of historical linguistics is the process by which "ad hoc" phrases become set in the language, and eventually become new words (see lexicon). Lexicalization contrasts with grammaticalization, and the relationship between the two processes is subject to some debate.


In psycholinguistics, lexicalization is the process of going from meaning to sound in speech production. The most widely accepted model, speech production, in which an underlying concept is converted into a word, is at least a two-stage process.


First, the semantic form (which is specified for meaning) is converted into a lemma, which is an abstract form specified for semantic and syntactic information (how a word can be used in a sentence), but not for phonological information (how a word is pronounced). The next stage is the lexeme, which is phonologically specified.


Some recent work has challenged this model, suggesting for example that there is no lemma stage, and that syntactic information is retrieved in the semantic and phonological stages.


Psychoanalytic conceptions of language refers to the intersection of psychoanalytic theory with linguistics and psycholinguistics. Language has been an integral component of the psychoanalytic framework since its inception, as evidenced by the fact that Anna O. (pseud. for Bertha Pappenheim), whose treatment via the cathartic method influenced the later development of psychoanalytic therapy, referred to her method of treatment as the "talking cure" (Freud & Breuer, 1895; de Mijolla, 2005).


Language is relevant to psychoanalysis in two key respects. First, it is important with respect to the therapeutic process, serving as the principal means by which unconscious mental processes are given expression through the verbal exchange between analyst and patient (e.g., free association, dream analysis, transference-countertransference dynamics). Secondly, psychoanalytic theory is linked in many ways to linguistic phenomena, such as parapraxes and the telling of jokes. According to Freud (1915, 1923), the essential difference between modes of thought characterized by "primary" (irrational, governed by the id) as opposed to "secondary" (logical, governed by the ego and external reality) thought processes is one of preverbal vs. verbal ways of conceptualizing the world.


According to Freud (1940), "...the function of speech…brings material in the ego into a firm connection with the residues of visual, but more particularly of auditory, perceptions" (p. 35). In other words, the mind is able to assimilate perceptual information through language - we are able to make sense of our perceptions by thinking about them in the form of words.


One of Freud's earliest papers, "On Aphasia" (1891), was concerned with speech disorders of neurological mechanisms of which had been investigated earlier in the century by Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke. Freud was skeptical of Wernicke's findings, citing a paucity of clinical observation as his reason. Although he conceded the fact that language is linked to neurological processes, Freud repudiated a model of localization of brain function, according to which specific regions of the brain are responsible for certain cognitive functions. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, Freud rejected the notion that in most cases pathological phenomena are manifestations of physiological dysfunctions (Lanteri-Laura, 2005a).


In this joke, we see multiple use of the same phrase with words in a different order, as well as the double meaning of the words "lay" and "lain." Ostensibly about a couple's financial status, this joke is effective because it allows for the overcoming of inhibition and the indirect expression of sexual impulses through the double meaning of words.


The new journal "Language and Psychoanalysis" is just devoted to research in the intersection between psychoanalysis and linguistics.


2. http://criminalisticassociation.org/Dokumenti/KTIP_12_20201219201241.pdf#page=8 (SCAN revisited through linguistic psychoanalysis)


A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. In "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage", Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".


Such a sentence leads the reader toward a seemingly familiar meaning that is actually not the one intended. It is a special type of sentence that creates a momentarily ambiguous interpretation because it contains a word or phrase that can be interpreted in multiple ways, causing the reader to begin to believe that a phrase will mean one thing when in reality it means something else. When read, the sentence seems ungrammatical, makes almost no sense, and often requires rereading so that its meaning may be fully understood after careful parsing.


"The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.".


This is another commonly cited example. Like the previous sentence, the initial parse is to read "the complex houses" as a noun phrase, but "the complex houses married" does not make semantic sense (houses do not marry) and "the complex houses married and single" makes no sense at all (after "married and...", the expectation is another verb to form a compound predicate). The correct parsing is "The complex" [noun phrase] "houses" [verb] "married and single soldiers" [noun phrase] "and their families" [noun phrase]. Rephrased, the sentence could be rewritten as "The complex provides housing for the soldiers, married or single, as well as their families."


"The horse raced past the barn fell.".


This example turns on the two meanings in German of , which can be either the adjective "modern" as in English, or the verb "modern" meaning, "to become moldy", "to rot".


The theme of the "picture exhibition" in the first clause lends itself to interpreting "modern" as an adjective meaning "contemporary", until the last two words of the sentence:


This causes dissonance at the end of the sentence, and forces back-tracking to recover the proper usage and sense (and different pronunciation) of the first word of the sentence, not as the adjective meaning "contemporary", but as the verb meaning "going moldy":


This example makes use of the ambiguity between the verb "suspeita" and the adjective "suspeita", which is also captured by the English word "suspect". It also makes use of a misreading in which the word is passed over by the parser, which lends to two different meanings.


Various strategies can be used when parsing a sentence, and there is much debate over which parsing strategy humans use. Differences in parsing strategies can be seen from the effects of a reader attempting to parse a part of a sentence that is ambiguous in its syntax or meaning. For this reason, garden-path sentences are often studied as a way to test which strategy humans use. Two debated parsing strategies that humans are thought to use are serial and parallel parsing.


Serial parsing is where the reader makes one interpretation of the ambiguity and continues to parse the sentence in the context of that interpretation. The reader will continue to use the initial interpretation as reference for future parsing until disambiguating information is given.


Parallel parsing is where the reader recognizes and generates multiple interpretations of the sentence and stores them until disambiguating information is given, at which point only the correct interpretation is maintained.


When ambiguous nouns appear, they can function as both the object of the first item or the subject of the second item. In that case, the former use is preferred. It is also found that the reanalysis of a garden-path sentence gets more and more difficult with the length of the ambiguous phrase.


A research paper published by Meseguer, Carreiras and Clifton (2002) stated that intensive eye movements are observed when people are recovering from a mild garden-path sentence. They proposed that people use two strategies, both of which are consistent with the selective reanalysis process described by Frazier and Rayner in 1982. According to them, the readers predominantly use two alternative strategies to recover from mild garden-path sentences.


Partial re-analysis occurs when analysis is not complete. Frequently, when people can make even a little bit of sense of the later sentence, they stop analysing further so the former part of the sentence still remains in memory and does not get discarded from it.


Therefore, the original misinterpretation of the sentence remains even after the re-analysis is done; hence participants' final interpretations are often incorrect.


is a professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Warwick. Professor Kita's work focuses on the Psycholinguistics properties of co-speech gesture, the relationship between spatial language, developmental psychology and cognition and sound symbolism. Kita received his PhD from the University of Chicago, working in the lab of David McNeill. from 1993-2003 he led the Gesture Project at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, one of the research foci of the MPI.


From April 2017 he is the editor of "GESTURE" (published by John Benjamins of Amsterdam). From 2012–2014 he was the president of the International Society for Gesture Studies, and vice-president from 2010-2012.


Poverty of the stimulus (POS) is the controversial argument from linguistics that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language. This is considered evidence contrary to the empiricist idea that language is learned solely through experience. The claim is that the sentences children hear while learning a language do not contain the information needed to develop a thorough understanding of the grammar of the language.


The POS is often used as evidence for universal grammar. This is the idea that all languages conform to the same structural principles, which define the space of possible languages. Both poverty of the stimulus and universal grammar are terms that can be credited to Noam Chomsky, the main proponent of generative grammar. Chomsky coined the term "poverty of the stimulus" in 1980. However, he had argued for the idea since his 1959 review of B.F. Skinner's "Verbal Behavior".


There was much research based on generative grammar in language development during the latter half of the twentieth century. This approach was abandoned by the mainstream researchers as a result of what many scientists perceived as the problems with the Poverty of the Stimulus argument.


An argument from the poverty of the stimulus generally takes the following structure:


Chomsky coined the term "poverty of the stimulus" in 1980. This idea is closely related to what Chomsky calls "Plato's Problem". He outlined this philosophical approach in the first chapter of the "Knowledge of Language" in 1986. Plato's Problem traces back to "Meno", a Socratic dialogue. In Meno, Socrates unearths knowledge of geometry concepts from a slave who was never explicitly taught them. Plato's Problem directly parallels the idea of the innateness of language, universal grammar, and more specifically the poverty of the stimulus argument because it reveals that people's knowledge is richer than what they are exposed to. Chomsky illustrates that humans are not exposed to all structures of their language, yet they fully achieve knowledge of these structures.


Linguistic nativism is the theory that humans are born with some knowledge of language. One acquires a language not entirely through experience. According to Noam Chomsky, "The speed and precision of vocabulary acquisition leaves no real alternative to the conclusion that the child somehow has the concepts available before experience with language and is basically learning labels for concepts that are already a part of his or her conceptual apparatus." One of the most significant arguments generative grammarians have for linguistic nativism is the poverty of the stimulus argument.


However, the argument that the poverty of the stimulus supports the innateness hypothesis remains controversial. For example, Fiona Cowie claims that the Poverty of Stimulus argument fails "on both empirical and conceptual grounds to support nativism".


Generative Grammarians have extensively studied the hypothesised innate effects on language in order to provide evidence for Poverty of the Stimulus. An overarching theme in examples is that children acquire grammatical rules based on evidence that is consistent with multiple generalizations. And since children are not instructed in the grammar of their language, the gap must be filled in by properties of the learner.


In general, pronouns can refer to any prominent individual in the discourse context. However, a pronoun cannot find its antecedent in certain structural positions, as defined by the Binding Theory. For example, the pronoun "he" can refer to the Ninja Turtle in (1) but not (2), above. Given that speech to children does not indicate what interpretations are impossible, the input is equally consistent with a grammar that allows coreference between "he" and "the Ninja Turtle" in (2) and one that does not. But, since all speakers of English recognize that (2) does not allow this coreference, this aspect of the grammar must come from some property internal to the learner.


The English word "one" can refer back to a previously mentioned property in the discourse. For example in (1), "one" can mean "ball".


In Wh-questions, the Wh-word at the beginning of the sentence (the filler) is related to a position later in the sentence (the gap). This relation can hold over an unbounded distance, as in (1). However, there are restrictions on the gap positions that a filler can be related to. These restrictions are called syntactic islands (2). Because questions with islands are ungrammatical, they are not included in the speech that children hear—but neither are grammatical Wh-questions that span multiple clauses. Because the speech children are exposed to is consistent with grammars which have island constraints and grammars which don't, something internal to the child must contribute this knowledge.


The poverty of the stimulus also applies in the domain of word learning. When learning a new word, children are exposed to examples of the word's referent, but not to the full extent of the category. For example, in learning the word "dog", a child might see a German Shepherd, a Great Dane and a Poodle. How do they know to extend this category to include Dachshunds and Bulldogs? The situations in which the word is used cannot provide the relevant information. Thus, something internal to learners must shape the way that they generalize. This problem is closely related to Quine's gavagai problem.


Critics claimed in the 1980s and 1990s that Chomsky's purported linguistic evidence for poverty of the stimulus may have been false. Around the same time there was research in applied linguistics and neuroscience that rejected the idea of significant aspects of languages being innate and not learned. Some scholars working on language acquisition in fields like psychology and applied linguistics reject most claims of nativism and consider that decades of research have been wasted since 1964 owing to the assumption of the poverty of the stimulus---an enterprise which has failed to make a lasting impact. However, those working in the framework of generative grammar consider nativism to be a logical necessity and to be supported by the existence of deep parallels among the languages of the world.


Hypocognition, in cognitive linguistics, means missing and being unable to communicate cognitive and linguistic representations because there are no words for particular concepts.


The word hypocognition (and its opposite, hypercognition) was coined by American psychiatrist and anthropologist Robert Levy in his 1973 book "Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands". After 26 months of studying them, Levy described Tahitians as having no words to describe sorrow or guilt, resulting in people who had suffered personal losses describing themselves as feeling sick or strange instead of sad. Levy believed the Tahitians' lack of frames for thinking about and expressing grief contributed to their high suicide rate. He believed that a balance between hypercognition and hypocognition was culturally most desirable.


Hypocognition is a phrase commonly used in linguistics. In 2004 George Lakoff used it to describe political progressives in the United States, saying that relative to conservatives they suffer from "massive hypocognition," which he described as the lack of having a progressive philosophy framed around the progressive core values of empathy and responsibility such as "effective government" versus "less government" or "broader prosperity" versus "free markets."


Hypocognition has been blamed for preventing the practical application of evidence-based medicine in areas where frames (contextual and presentational influences on perceptions of reality) obscure facts. More generally, experts often overuse their own expertise: e.g. cardiologist diagnose a heart problem when the actual problem is something else.


Frame-based terminology is a cognitive approach to terminology developed by Pamela Faber and colleagues at the University of Granada. One of its basic premises is that the conceptualization of any specialized domain is goal-oriented, and depends to a certain degree on the task to be accomplished. Since a major problem in modeling any domain is the fact that languages can reflect different conceptualizations and construals, texts as well as specialized knowledge resources are used to extract a set of domain concepts. Language structure is also analyzed to obtain an inventory of conceptual relations to structure these concepts.


As its name implies, frame-based terminology uses certain aspects of frame semantics to structure specialized domains and create non-language-specific representations. Such configurations are the conceptual meaning underlying specialized texts in different languages, and thus facilitate specialized knowledge acquisition.


In frame-based terminology, conceptual networks are based on an underlying domain event, which generates templates for the actions and processes that take place in the specialized field as well as the entities that participate in them.


As a result, knowledge extraction is largely text-based. The terminological entries are composed of information from specialized texts as well as specialized language resources. Knowledge is configured and represented in a dynamic conceptual network that is capable of adapting to new contexts. At the most general level, generic roles of agent, patient, result, and instrument are activated by basic predicate meanings such as make, do, affect, use, become, etc. which structure the basic meanings in specialized texts. From a linguistic perspective, Aktionsart distinctions in texts are based on Van Valin's classification of predicate types. At the more specific levels of the network, the qualia structure of the generative lexicon is used as a basis for the systematic classification and relation of nominal entities.


The methodology of frame-based terminology derives the conceptual system of the domain by means of an integrated top-down and bottom-up approach. The bottom-up approach consists of extracting information from a corpus of texts in various languages, specifically related to the domain. The top-down approach includes the information provided by specialized dictionaries and other reference material, complemented by the help of experts in the field.


In a parallel way, the underlying conceptual framework of a knowledge-domain event is specified. The most generic or base-level categories of a domain are configured in a prototypical domain event or action-environment interface. This provides a template applicable to all levels of information structuring. In this way a structure is obtained which facilitates and enhances knowledge acquisition since the information in term entries is internally as well as externally coherent.


Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.


For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process involving such areas as word recognition, orthography (spelling), alphabetics, phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and motivation.


Other types of reading and writing, such as pictograms (e.g., a hazard symbol and an emoji), are not based on speech based writing systems. The common link is the interpretation of symbols to extract the meaning from the visual notations or tactile signals (as in the case of Braille).


Reading is typically an individual activity, done silently, although on occasion a person reads out loud for other listeners; or reads aloud for one's own use, for better comprehension. Before the reintroduction of separated text in the late Middle Ages, the ability to read silently was considered rather remarkable.


Major predictors of an individual's ability to read both alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts are oral language skills, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and verbal IQ.


As a leisure activity, children and adults read because it is pleasant and interesting. In the US, about half of all adults read one or more books for pleasure each year. About 5% read more than 50 books per year. Americans read more if they: have more education, read fluently and easily, are female, live in cities, and have higher socioeconomic status. Children become better readers when they know more about the world in general, and when they perceive reading as fun rather than another chore to be performed.


Reading is an essential part of literacy, yet from a historical perspective literacy is about having the ability to both read and write.


And, since the 1990s some organizations have defined literacy in a wide variety of ways that may go beyond the traditional ability to read and write. The following are some examples:


In the academic field, some view literacy in a more philosophical manner and propose the concept of "multiliteracies". For example, they say, "this huge shift from traditional print-based literacy to 21st century multiliteracies reflects the impact of communication technologies and multimedia on the evolving nature of texts, as well as the skills and dispositions associated with the consumption, production, evaluation, and distribution of those texts (Borsheim, Meritt, & Reed, 2008, p. 87)". According to cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg these "multiple literacies" have allowed educators to change the topic from reading and writing to "Literacy". He goes on to say that some educators, when faced with criticisms of how reading is taught, "didn't alter their practices, they changed the subject".


Also, some organizations might include numeracy skills and technology skills separately but alongside of literacy skills.


In addition, since the 1940s the term literacy is often used to mean having knowledge or skill in a particular field (e.g., computer literacy, ecological literacy, health literacy, media literacy, quantitative literacy (numeracy) and visual literacy).


In order to understand a text, it is usually necessary to understand the spoken language associated with that text. In this way, writing systems are distinguished from many other symbolic communication systems. Once established, writing systems on the whole change more slowly than their spoken counterparts, and often preserve features and expressions which are no longer current in the spoken language. The great benefit of writing systems is their ability to maintain a persistent record of information expressed in a language, which can be retrieved independently of the initial act of formulation.


Reading for pleasure has been linked to increased cognitive progress in vocabulary and mathematics during adolescence.


Sustained high volume lifetime reading has been associated with high levels of academic attainment.


Reading has also been shown to improve stress management, memory, focus, writing skills, and imagination.


The cognitive benefits of reading continue into mid-life and the senior years.


Reading books and writing are among brain-stimulating activities shown to slow down cognitive decline in seniors.


Reading has been the subject of considerable research and reporting for decades. Many organizations measure and report on for children and adults (e.g., NAEP, PIRLS, PISA and PIAAC).


Researchers have concluded that 95% of students can be taught to read by the end of first grade, yet in many countries 20% or more do not meet that expectation.


According to the 2019 Nation's Report card, 35% of grade four students in the USA failed to perform at or above the "Basic level" (partial mastery of the proficient level skills). There was a significant difference by race and ethnicity (e.g., black students at 53% and white students at 24%). See more .


The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) publishes reading achievement for fourth graders in 50 countries. The five countries with the highest overall reading average are the Russian Federation, Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Ireland and Finland. Some others are: England 10th, United States 15th, Australia 21st, Canada 23rd, and New Zealand 33rd.


The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures 15-year-old school pupils scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading.


The reading levels of adults, ages 16 – 65, in 39 countries are reported by The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Between 2011 and 2018, PIAAC reports the percentage of adults reading "at-or-below level one" (the lowest of five levels). Some examples are Japan 4.9%, Finland 10.6%, Netherlands 11.7%, Australia 12.6%, Sweden 13.3%, Canada 16.4%, England (UK) 16.4%, and the USA 16.9%.


According to the World Bank, 53% of all children in low-and-middle-income countries suffer from 'learning poverty'. In 2019, using data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, they published a report entitled "Ending Learning Poverty: What will it take?". Learning poverty is defined as being unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10.


Although they say that all foundational skills are important, include reading, numeracy, basic reasoning ability, socio-emotional skills, and others – they focus specifically on reading. Their reasoning is that reading proficiency is an easily understood metric of learning, reading is a student's gateway to learning in every other area, and reading proficiency can serve as a proxy for foundational learning in other subjects.


They suggest five pillars to reduce learning poverty: 1) learners are prepared and motivated to learn, 2) teachers at all levels are effective and valued, 3) classrooms are equipped for learning, 4) Schools are safe and inclusive spaces, and 5) education systems are well-managed.


Learning to read (or, reading skills acquisition) is the acquisition and practice of the skills necessary to understand the meaning behind printed words. For a skilled reader, the act of reading feels simple, effortless, and automatic. However, the process of learning to read is complex and builds on cognitive, linguistic, and social skills developed from a very early age. As one of the four core language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), reading is vital to gaining a command of the written language.


In the United States and elsewhere, it is widely believed that students who lack proficiency in reading by the end of grade three may face obstacles for the rest of their academic career. For example, it is estimated that they would not be able to read half of the material they will encounter in grade four.


In 2019, with respect to the reading skills of grade-four US public school students, only 44% of white students and 18% of black students performed at or above the "proficient level" of the . Also, in 2012, in the United Kingdom it has been reported that 15-year-old students are reading at the age of 12-year-old students.


As a result, many governments put practices in place to ensure that students are reading at grade level by the end of grade three. An example of this is the Third Grade Reading Guarantee created by the State of Ohio in 2017. This is a program to identify students from kindergarten through grade three that are behind in reading, and provide support to make sure they are on track for reading success by the end of grade three. This is also known as remedial education. Another example is the policy in England whereby any pupil who is struggling to decode words properly by year three must "urgently" receive help through a "rigorous and systematic phonics programme".


In 2016, out of 50 countries, the United States achieved the 15th highest score in grade-four reading ability. The ten countries with the highest overall reading average are the Russian Federation, Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Ireland, Finland, Poland, Northern Ireland, Norway, Chinese Taipei and England (UK). Some others are: Australia 21st, Canada 23rd, New Zealand 33rd, France 34th, Saudi Arabia 44th, and South Africa 50th.


Spoken language is the foundation of learning to read (long before children see any letters) and children’s knowledge of the phonological structure of language is a good predictor of early reading ability. Spoken language is dominant for most of childhood, however, reading ultimately catches up and surpasses speech.


By their first birthday most children have learned all the sounds in their spoken language. However, it takes longer for them to learn the phonological form of words and to begin developing a spoken vocabulary.


Children acquire a spoken language in a few years. Five-to-six-year-old English learners have vocabularies of 2,500 to 5,000 words, and add 5,000 words per year for the first several years of schooling. This exponential learning rate cannot be accounted for by the instruction they receive. Instead, children learn that the meaning of a new word can be inferred because it occurs in the same context as familiar words (e.g., "lion" is often seen with "cowardly" and "king"). As British linguist John Rupert Firth says, "You shall know a word by the company it keeps".


The environment in which children live may also impact their ability to acquire reading skills. Children who are regularly exposed to chronic environmental noise pollution, such as highway traffic noise, have been known to show decreased ability to discriminate between phonemes (oral language sounds) as well as lower reading scores on standardized tests.


Reading to children: necessary but not sufficient.


Children learn to speak naturally — by listening to other people speak. However, reading is not a natural process, and many children need to learn to read through a process that involves "systematic guidance and feedback".


So, "reading to children is not the same as teaching children to read". Nonetheless, reading to children is important because it socializes them to the activity of reading; it engages them; it expands their knowledge of spoken language; and it enriches their linguistic ability by hearing new and novel words and grammatical structures.


However, there is some evidence that "shared reading" with children does help to improve reading if the children's attention is directed to the words on the page as they are being read to.


The path to skilled reading involves learning the alphabetic principle, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.