Cognition

Secondary

How the mind encodes, stores, transforms, and sometimes fails to retrieve the world it builds from sensation.

This collection covers cognitive psychology, including thinking and problem-solving, decision making and cognitive biases, language and cognition, memory stages and types, factors affecting memory, sensory and perceptual processes, and theories and testing of intelligence. Aligned with the IPsyO (International Psychology Olympiad) syllabus.

Academic primerCognitive science

Earn3CreditsinPsychology

4Modules11Sessions177Cards53Quizzes

Modules in this Collection’s System

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1. Cognition

Thinking, deciding, and talking — how the mind processes information, where it cuts corners, and which corners consistently trip it up.

3Sessions

2. Memory

Memory as a three-stage system — and the characteristic ways each stage fails or reconstructs what it claims to recall.

3Sessions

3. Perception

From raw sensation to organized perception — how the Gestalt tradition and modern research explain what the brain adds to the retinal image.

2Sessions

4. Intelligence

Intelligence as a measurement problem — what psychometrics captures, what it misses, and what heritability actually tells us.

3Sessions

What You'll Walk Away With

1cognitive biases taxonomy card grouping heuristics (availability, representativeness, anchoring) and biases (confirmation, framing, hindsight) by the underlying mental shortcut they exploit
1memory stages diagnostic map pinpointing whether a failure is at encoding, storage, or retrieval and what the typical cause is at each stage
1perceptual organization key listing the Gestalt grouping principles (proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, common fate) with concrete visual examples
1intelligence theories comparison table contrasting Spearman's g, Gardner's multiple intelligences, Sternberg's triarchic theory, and the CHC hierarchy on what they include and what they exclude
1language levels hierarchy mapping phonemes → morphemes → syntax → semantics → pragmatics so each linguistic analysis targets the right level

You'll Have Answers To

?Why is every memory a reconstruction rather than a replay — and what does that imply about eyewitness testimony?
?When a decision goes wrong because of a cognitive bias, which specific mental shortcut misfired — and why does that shortcut exist?
?How does perception 'see' depth, motion, and constancy from a flat, changing retinal image?
?Is intelligence one thing (Spearman's g) or many (Gardner, Sternberg) — and what does the answer depend on?
?What does it really mean to say IQ is '50% heritable' — and what does that statistic not say?

Critical Concepts Explored

Attention, working memory, long-term memoryEncoding, storage, retrievalLevels of processing and elaborative rehearsalSchemas and memory reconstructionHeuristics vs. biases (availability, representativeness, anchoring)System 1 vs. System 2 thinkingGestalt principles and perceptual constanciesTop-down vs. bottom-up processingSpearman's g and multi-factor intelligence theoriesHeritability and the Flynn effect

Editor's Note

“Cognitive psychology as a working diagnostic toolkit”

This collection treats cognition the way a mechanic treats an engine — encoding, storage, retrieval, attention, and perception each named as separable stages with distinct failure modes. The sections on memory construction and decision-making biases are especially sharp: they replace the textbook greatest-hits with a usable map of how the mind actually behaves under load.

Editor's Brief

Who it's for: Students preparing for IPsyO, AP Psychology, or any introductory cognitive science course where memorizing definitions won't cut it and the exam wants you to reason about mechanism.
What stands out: Every cognitive process is introduced with the failure modes that reveal it — memory through forgetting curves and false memory, perception through illusions and constancies, intelligence through measurement controversies.
Read if: You want to understand the mind as an information-processing system with specific bottlenecks and specific reconstructive habits — not as a generic 'brain does thinking' black box.

Gold Quotes

Memory does not store experiences — it stores fragments and rules for reassembling them. Every recall is a reconstruction, shaped by schemas, mood, and the questions you're being asked.

Loftus's misinformation research, Bartlett's 'War of the Ghosts,' and the eyewitness-testimony literature all point to the same finding: the act of remembering is itself a kind of editing. This is why leading questions can implant details, why expectations warp recall, and why a confident memory and an accurate memory are not the same thing.

Cognitive biases are not bugs in human reasoning — they are the reasoning. The mind evolved to reach fast, good-enough answers under uncertainty, and the heuristics that deliver those answers are also what produce the biases.

Kahneman and Tversky's System 1 / System 2 framework shows why: availability, representativeness, and anchoring are shortcuts that work most of the time — which is why we use them. The cost is predictable, patterned error in the minority of cases where the shortcut misfires. Understanding the biases is understanding the shortcut, not denouncing it.

Heritability of IQ describes variance within a population in a specific environment — it tells you nothing about what's fixed in any individual, and nothing about what IQ would be in a different environment.

A heritability estimate of 0.5 means half the observed variance is attributable to genetic differences among people currently in that environment. Change the environment (nutrition, schooling, exposure), and both the heritability estimate and the mean can shift. Flynn effect gains of ~3 IQ points per decade prove the point.

About the Curator

IInternational Psychology Olympiad

International Psychology Olympiad is the editorial voice behind LearningFirst's IPsyO-aligned collections — producing rigorous, exam-ready primers on core psychological science for learners preparing for competitions and introductory university coursework.

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