In psychology, steering cognition is a model of a cognitive executive function which contributes to how attention is regulated and corresponding responses coordinated.
The term 'steering cognition' was coined by the researcher Simon P. Walker who discovered consistent, replicable patterns of attention and corresponding response through repeated cognitive tests between 2000 and 2015, in studies with over 15,000 individuals. [1] Working with his colleague Jo Walker, he was able to show that these patterns correlated with other cognitive attributes such as mental wellbeing, social competency and academic performance. Together, Walker and Walker conjecture that steering cognition is a central mechanism by which people self-regulate their cognitive, emotional and social states. [2]
Steering cognition describes how the brain biases attention toward specific stimuli whilst ignoring others, before coordinating responsive actions which cohere with our past patterns of self-representation. Steering cognition enables the use of limited cognitive resources to make sense of the world that someone expects to see.
Walker developed a specific steering cognition test used with more than 11,000 candidates between the ages of eight and 60 between 2002 and 2015. Using principal component analysis, Walker was able to identify 7 latent largely independent 'heuristic substitution' factors which he labelled S, L, X, P, M, O, T. He labelled this data model 'the Human Ecology model of Cognitive Affective Social state' or CAS for short. [3] In the most recent and largest ever study, involving 8,000 secondary pupils in the UK, exploratory factor analysis confirmed a largely orthogonal factor analysis structure in which Eigen values revealed the CAS model 7 latent factors explained 50% of the overall variance. For the sake of parsimony, a 7 factor solution has been regarded as acceptable. Studies have shown that steering cognition is distinct from the mind's engine or 'algorithmic processing' which is responsible for how we process complex calculations. [4] The state of steering cognition at any time is influenced by 'priming' effects - cues in the surrounding environment such as sights, sounds and messages of which we may not be conscious. Studies have shown that environmental biasing of our steering cognition can contribute to non-conscious in-group behaviours, e.g. an increased likelihood of groupthink or emotional contagion. [5] Studies have shown that, during adolescence, individuals develop more fixed patterns of steering. [5] By adulthood, these patterns become recognisable as mental traits, behaviours and social attributes. There are some authors, including Meredith Belbin, who claim that people with more flexible steering cognition have advantages in jobs which require greater social or cognitive dexterity because of improved social relating and leadership skills. [4] [6] [7] [8] Steering cognition has been shown to depend on our ability to mental simulate or imagine ourselves performing tasks and functions. [9] As such, Steering cognition requires the capacity to self-represent, associating memories of our past and possible future selves. [10] Steering cognition has been shown to implicate our affective (emotional), social and abstract cognitions. [11] [12]
The ability to regulate steering cognition has been shown to account for up to 15% of academic outcomes at secondary school not accounted for by IQ. [4] Steering cognition can be improved through pupil feedback, coaching and more carefully structured and supportive environments. [13] Poorly regulated steering cognition has been shown to correlate strongly with increased mental health and welfare risks during adolescence. A study in 2015 showed that pupils with certain fixed biases in their steering cognition were four times more likely to exhibit self-harm, be bullied or not cope with school pressures. [4]
A large 2014 study showed that boarding school education resulted in better pupil ability to regulate steering cognition across social situations than day school education. This so-called 'tribe effect' is conjectured to lead to continued social advantages beyond school, such as access to future in-group benefits in work and wider society. [14]
The importance of steering cognition lies in its explanation of human behaviours which lead to either risks or advantages for individuals and groups. The ability to regulate one's steering cognition is unrelated to IQ or rational group behaviour, so measuring steering cognition offers an explanation of behaviours and events not currently detected by traditional metrics and models. The Sunday Times reported in October 2015 [15] that a growing number of schools in the UK, including independent schools Monkton Combe School and Wellington College, were now using a technology, AS Tracking, developed by Mind.World to measure student steering cognition as an 'early warning system' for welfare and mental health risks. [16] Thomas's London Day Schools are using a curriculum, Footprints, to train pupils as young as eight to improve their steering cognition as part of their social and emotional development. [17] Wellington College [18] has engaged in steering cognition research studies as part of the school's evidenced-based education programme. Harrow School, one of Britain's leading independent schools, is piloting AS Tracking as part of a proactive strategy to provide the best possible pastoral care for pupils. The school is measuring steering cognition to gather concrete measurements that can be used as supporting evidence when planning or dealing with individuals and also tracking changes over time as boys move up through the school. Educational campaigners Sir Anthony Seldon and Sir Peter Lampl have suggested steering cognition has application for understanding and improving social mobility. [19]
Steering cognition is a model of social and cognitive executive function. It explains a functional governor mechanism by which the mind coordinates attention and executes responsive action.
Steering cognition is a model of metacognition. It describes the capacity of the mind to exert conscious control over its reasoning and processing strategies in relation to external data and internal state.
Steering cognition is an explanatory mechanism of some phenomena of affective, cognitive and social self-regulation. It describes effortful control processes which exhibit depletion after strain.
Steering cognition has been repeatedly shown to implicate the mind's mental simulation circuitry. As such, it is associated with functional neural circuits involved in prospective and retrospective memory, self-representation, associative processing and imagination.
According to the steering cognition model, dual process System 1 functions as a serial cognitive steering processor for System 2, rather than the traditionally understood parallel system. In order to process epistemically varied environmental data, a steering cognition orientation system is required to align varied, incoming environmental data with existing neural algorithmic processes. The brain's associative simulation capacity, centered around the imagination, plays an integrator role to perform this function.
In the cognitive steering model, a conscious state emerges from effortful associative simulation, required to align novel data accurately with remote memory, via later algorithmic processes. By contrast, fast unconscious automaticity is constituted by unregulated simulatory biases, which induce errors in subsequent algorithmic processes. The phrase 'rubbish in, rubbish out' is used to explain errorful steering cognition processing: errors will always occur if the accuracy of initial retrieval and location of data is poorly self-regulated.
Steering cognition provides an explanation of how the mind is non-consciously influenced by the environmental cues, or primes, around it. Steering cognition studies have produced data of attentional bias and blindness best explained by environmental priming.
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include perception, memory, attention, reasoning, language, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision-making to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics, as well as applied psychology, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines like cognitive science, linguistics, and economics.
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.
Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge to discover new knowledge.
Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally, in addition or opposition to employing the scientific method, it also relies on symbolic interpretation and critical analysis, although these traditions have tended to be less pronounced than in other social sciences, such as sociology. Psychologists study phenomena such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Some, especially depth psychologists, also study the unconscious mind.
Volition, also known as will or conation, is the cognitive process by which an individual decides on and commits to a particular course of action. It is defined as purposive striving and is one of the primary human psychological functions. Others include affect, motivation, and cognition (thinking). Volitional processes can be applied consciously or they can be automatized as habits over time.
Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.
Awareness, in philosophy and psychology, is a perception or knowledge of something. The concept is often synonymous with consciousness. However, one can be aware of something without being explicitly conscious of it, such as in the case of blindsight.
Metacognition is an awareness of one's thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them. The term comes from the root word meta, meaning "beyond", or "on top of". Metacognition can take many forms, such as reflecting on one's ways of thinking, and knowing when and how oneself and others use particular strategies for problem-solving. There are generally two components of metacognition: (1) cognitive conceptions and (2) cognitive regulation system. Research has shown that both components of metacognition play key roles in metaconceptual knowledge and learning. Metamemory, defined as knowing about memory and mnemonic strategies, is an important aspect of metacognition.
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 following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to thought (thinking):
Implicit cognition refers to cognitive processes that occur outside conscious awareness or conscious control. This includes domains such as learning, perception, or memory which may influence a person's behavior without their conscious awareness of those influences.
Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
In psychology, the human mind is considered to be a cognitive miser due to the tendency of humans to think and solve problems in simpler and less effortful ways rather than in more sophisticated and effortful ways, regardless of intelligence. Just as a miser seeks to avoid spending money, the human mind often seeks to avoid spending cognitive effort. The cognitive miser theory is an umbrella theory of cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attributional biases to explain when and why people are cognitive misers.
The self-regulation of emotion or emotion regulation is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed. It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. The self-regulation of emotion belongs to the broader set of emotion regulation processes, which includes both the regulation of one's own feelings and the regulation of other people's feelings.
Heuristics is the process by which humans use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions. Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals, organizations, and even machines use to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems. Often this involves focusing on the most relevant aspects of a problem or situation to formulate a solution. While heuristic processes are used to find the answers and solutions that are most likely to work or be correct, they are not always right or the most accurate. Judgments and decisions based on heuristics are simply good enough to satisfy a pressing need in situations of uncertainty, where information is incomplete. In that sense they can differ from answers given by logic and probability.
Motivated reasoning is a cognitive and social response in which individuals, consciously or sub-consciously, allow emotion-loaded motivational biases to affect how new information is perceived. Individuals tend to favor evidence that coincides with their current beliefs and reject new information that contradicts them, despite contrary evidence.
Affect regulation and "affect regulation theory" are important concepts in psychiatry and psychology and in close relation with emotion regulation. However, the latter is a reflection of an individual's mood status rather than their affect. Affect regulation is the actual performance one can demonstrate in a difficult situation regardless of what their mood or emotions are. It is tightly related to the quality of executive and cognitive functions and that is what distinguishes this concept from emotion regulation. One can have a low emotional control but a high level of control on his or her affect, and therefore, demonstrate a normal interpersonal functioning as a result of intact cognition.
Intuition in the context of decision-making is defined as a "non-sequential information-processing mode." It is distinct from insight and can be contrasted with the deliberative style of decision-making. Intuition can influence judgment through either emotion or cognition, and there has been some suggestion that it may be a means of bridging the two. Individuals use intuition and more deliberative decision-making styles interchangeably, but there has been some evidence that people tend to gravitate to one or the other style more naturally. People in a good mood gravitate toward intuitive styles, while people in a bad mood tend to become more deliberative. The specific ways in which intuition actually influences decisions remain poorly understood.
The fading affect bias, more commonly known as FAB, is a psychological phenomenon in which memories associated with negative emotions tend to be forgotten more quickly than those associated with positive emotions. FAB only refers to the feelings one has associated with the memories and not the content of the memories themselves. Early research studied FAB retrospectively, or through personal reflection, which brought about some criticism because retrospective analysis can be affected by subjective retrospective biases. However, new research using non-retrospective recall studies have found evidence for FAB, and the phenomenon has become largely accepted.
