Attention as Selection: What Gets Into Consciousness
How attentional filtering, limited capacity, and surprising dissociations shape what enters conscious experience
Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Heuristics Versus Optimization
Why the mind's best decisions come from knowing what to ignore, not what to compute
Cognitive Penetration: When Beliefs Change What You See
Research suggests your beliefs don't just interpret what you see—they may actually alter the seeing itself.
Dual Process Theories: Two Minds in One Brain
Inside the framework that split cognition into intuitive and deliberate systems—and why its critics say that's too simple
Cognitive Load: Why Complex Thinking Exhausts You
What empirical research on working memory reveals about the real costs of conscious thought
Mental Causation: How Thoughts Move Bodies
If brains do all the physical work, where does thinking fit into causing action?
The Frame Problem: Why Context Is Computationally Expensive
How cognitive systems filter infinite irrelevance—and why determining what matters may be the deepest puzzle of mind.
The Symbol Grounding Problem: How Meaning Enters the Machine
Why syntax alone can't explain meaning, and what cognitive science reveals about bridging the gap between symbols and semantics.
Working Memory: The Cognitive Workspace That Makes Thought Possible
The limited cognitive system that enables unlimited thought—how working memory makes complex reasoning possible
Implicit Learning: The Knowledge You Can't Report
How your mind absorbs complex patterns without your permission or awareness
Consciousness Without Attention: What Your Mind Does in the Dark
Attention and consciousness can come apart—revealing how much of your mental life may occur beyond the spotlight of awareness.
Why Emotions Aren't Just Feelings: The Cognitive Structure of Affect
Cognitive science reveals emotions as sophisticated evaluations, not primitive disruptions—information systems that enable rather than undermine rational thought.
Concepts Without Definitions: How Categories Really Work
Discover why your mind organizes knowledge through similarity and prototypes rather than dictionary definitions—and what this reveals about thought itself.
Extended Mind: Are Your Tools Part of Your Thinking?
Your smartphone might be more than a tool—cognitive science suggests it could be a genuine component of your thinking system
Predictive Processing: Your Brain as Hypothesis Machine
Discover how your brain constructs reality through prediction, not passive reception—and why getting things wrong is how you learn.
The Binding Problem: How Separate Brain Regions Create Unified Experience
Discover how your brain weaves scattered neural signals into seamless conscious experience—and why this integration remains one of science's deepest mysteries.
Why Folk Psychology Persists Despite Neuroscience
Examining why belief-desire reasoning survives neuroscience's advance and what this reveals about explanation itself.
Mental Representation Without Pictures in the Head
How cognitive science reveals that thoughts connect to reality through abstract structures, not internal photographs—transforming our understanding of mind itself.
The Modularity Debate: Is Your Mind a Swiss Army Knife?
Fodor's modularity thesis versus massive modularity: what cognitive architecture reveals about whether your mind is specialized machinery or flexible general reasoner.
Why Your Brain Builds Models of Other Minds
How cognitive science unravels the mechanisms behind your brain's remarkable ability to represent what others think, want, and believe.