1. Process selection criteria¶
1.1 What counts as a process in this catalog?¶
A cognitive process is a mental operation hypothesized to occur in a participant during a trial - something with an identifiable onset, an eliciting condition, and an in-principle measurable signature. Concretely, a candidate is a cognitive process if we can plausibly answer three questions:
When does it happen? - at what point in a trial, relative to stimulus and response, would we expect this process to be engaged?
How is it elicited? - what stimulus structure, instruction, or contingency would drive it?
How is it measured? - what behavioral, physiological, or neural signature would index it (even if imperfectly)?
This is a forward-looking plausibility test, not a gating filter. We keep candidates where we expect the answers exist in the literature, even if we have not yet found them. The test exists to rule out things that are categorically the wrong kind of object - not to demand finished evidence.
A process row should sit at the level where the inclusion-test triple has a single answer. If the question “when does it happen” has multiple, non-reducible answers (e.g., “working memory” can mean encoding, maintenance, manipulation, or updating, each at different trial phases), the candidate is too coarse and should be either split into sub-processes or treated as a category label only.
1.2 Processes that are excluded¶
The following do not count as cognitive processes in this catalog:
States and traits: Fear, arousal, anxiety, empathy-as-a-trait, boredom, mood. HED handles these as stimulus/state labels.
Specific emotions as states: Happiness, disgust, anger, sadness. These are what participants experience, not operations they perform. Emotion recognition and emotion regulation are processes; the emotions themselves are not.
Stimulus categories: Faces, words, tones, music. These are inputs to processes, not processes themselves.
Individual-difference constructs: Fluid intelligence, working-memory capacity as a score, impulsivity as a trait, handedness, dexterity. These describe between-person variation, not within-trial operations.
Dimensions and task parameters: Valence, arousal as a dimension, working-memory load, stimulus-onset asynchrony. These are properties of stimuli or experimental designs.
Umbrella terms: Attention, Memory, Language, Perception, Reasoning, Motivation, Social cognition, Consciousness, Emotion, Cognitive control, Motor control, Decision making. The category label carries the umbrella role; no process row should repeat it. Each umbrella that was in the original list has been either dropped entirely or split into concrete sub-processes that individually pass the inclusion test.
Analysis methods and modeling frameworks: Drift-diffusion modeling, Bayesian inference, representational similarity analysis. These are ways of measuring or modeling processes, not processes themselves.
Paradigm names used as process labels: A paradigm name (e.g., “Stroop effect”) is not a process. The underlying operations (interference control, response conflict) are.
1.3 Process vs. phenomenon¶
When the literature uses the same noun for both a phenomenon and the process producing it (extinction, directed forgetting, retroactive interference, masking), we treat it as a process and fold the phenomenon into the same row. We do not create separate rows for the process and the phenomenon it produces unless the distinction earns its keep.
1.4 Modality-abstract vs. modality-specific¶
Processes at the process level are modality-abstract when the same mechanism operates across modalities. Masking is a single process row (modality-abstract); the Auditory Masking Task and Visual Masking Task carry the modality distinction on the task side. The same pattern applies to priming and similar constructs: one process row, multiple task rows.