Processes by category¶

The 19 categories, each with its scope statement and the processes filed under it. Every process is in exactly one category. The category pages add what is out of scope, open issues, and each process’s aliases, tasks and references. The alphabetical list has the same processes in name order.

Associative Learning and Reinforcement ¶

Learning of stimulus-stimulus, stimulus-response, and action-outcome contingencies under reinforcement; Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning; extinction; reversal; model-based and model-free reinforcement learning; reward prediction error.

Associative learning ¶

Learning of co-occurrence relations between stimuli or between stimuli and responses. Engaged by 7 tasks.

Extinction ¶

Decrease in a previously reinforced response when reinforcement is withheld; a form of new inhibitory learning rather than erasure. Engaged by 1 task.

Goal-directed behavior ¶

Behavior that is sensitive to current outcome value, characteristic of action–outcome learning. Engaged by 1 task.

Habit ¶

Behavior that is insensitive to the current value of its outcome, characteristic of stimulus–response learning. Engaged by 1 task.

Instrumental conditioning ¶

Learning that an action produces an outcome; also called operant conditioning. Encompasses both goal-directed (action–outcome) and habitual (stimulus–response) control, studied via reinforcement schedules and outcome-devaluation procedures. Engaged by 1 task.

Model-based learning ¶

Reinforcement learning that uses an internal model of the environment’s transition and reward structure to plan. Engaged by 1 task.

Model-free learning ¶

Reinforcement learning from cached value estimates updated by prediction errors, without an explicit model of the environment. Engaged by 1 task.

Pavlovian conditioning ¶

Learning that a neutral stimulus predicts a biologically significant outcome, leading to conditioned responding. Engaged by 1 task.

Policy learning ¶

Direct learning of a mapping from states to actions without necessarily estimating values. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Reinforcement learning ¶

Learning to select actions that maximize cumulative reward through experience with reward prediction errors. Engaged by 7 tasks.

Reversal learning ¶

Relearning after contingencies between stimuli (or responses) and outcomes are switched. Engaged by 1 task.

Reward prediction error ¶

Signed difference between received and expected reward, instantiated by phasic midbrain dopamine firing. Engaged by 7 tasks.

Value learning ¶

Acquisition of the expected value of stimuli, actions, or states from experience with outcomes. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Auditory and Pre-Attentive Deviance Processing ¶

Pitch perception, auditory tone discrimination, acoustic processing, auditory perception; the family of processes indexed by MMN / oddball paradigms.

Acoustic processing ¶

Low-level analysis of sound, including frequency, intensity, and temporal structure. Engaged by 1 task.

Auditory perception ¶

Perception of sound, including pitch, timbre, loudness, and spatial location. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Auditory tone discrimination ¶

Judgment of whether two tones differ in pitch, intensity, or duration. Engaged by 1 task.

Pitch perception ¶

Perception of the highness or lowness of a sound, related to fundamental frequency. Engaged by 1 task.

Awareness, Agency, and Metacognition ¶

Conscious experience of perception (perceptual awareness, masking); metacognitive monitoring and control; sense of agency; body ownership; interoceptive awareness; self-referential processing; feeling of knowing; judgment of learning; mind wandering; self-monitoring; attentional awareness.

Attentional awareness ¶

Awareness of the current focus and content of attention. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Body ownership ¶

The experience that a body or body-part belongs to the self, revealed by multisensory illusions in which synchronous visuo-tactile or visuo-proprioceptive input shifts the perceived location of the body. Engaged by 1 task.

Feeling of knowing ¶

Judgment that information currently not retrievable would be recognized if presented. Engaged by 1 task.

Interoceptive awareness ¶

Conscious perception of internal bodily signals such as heartbeat, respiration, and visceral state; indexed by heartbeat-detection accuracy, heartbeat-evoked potentials, and interoceptive sensibility measures. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Judgment of learning ¶

Prediction of future memory performance made during or after encoding. Engaged by 1 task.

Masking ¶

Reduction in visibility or detectability of a target stimulus by a temporally or spatially adjacent masker. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Metacognitive control ¶

Regulation of cognition based on metacognitive monitoring - study-time allocation, strategy selection, answer withholding, and restart decisions - linking second-order evaluation to first-order behavior. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Metacognitive monitoring ¶

Second-order evaluation of ongoing first-order cognition - how confident one is in a perception, memory, or judgment - yielding reportable assessments that dissociate from first-order accuracy. Engaged by 6 tasks.

Mind wandering ¶

Task-unrelated thought that arises during an ongoing task. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Perceptual awareness ¶

Conscious access to perceptual content. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Self-monitoring ¶

Ongoing evaluation of one’s own performance against task goals and expected outcomes. Engaged by 6 tasks.

Self-referential processing ¶

Processing of information in relation to the self, yielding enhanced encoding for self-relevant material and characteristic engagement of cortical midline structures (mPFC, PCC). Engaged by 3 tasks.

Sense of agency ¶

The experience of being the cause of one’s own actions and their sensory consequences, dissociable into implicit (intentional binding) and explicit (authorship judgment) components. Engaged by 1 task.

Cognitive Flexibility and Higher-Order Executive Function ¶

Task-set reconfiguration (set shifting), rule updating, strategy selection, goal maintenance. Current inhabitants: goal maintenance, set shifting, strategy use.

Goal maintenance ¶

Active holding of task goals, rules, or sub-goals in a form that biases ongoing processing. Engaged by 1 task.

Set shifting ¶

Flexible reconfiguration of the task set in response to a change in task demands; the primary experimental operationalization of cognitive flexibility, measured by task-switching paradigms and the WCST. Engaged by 5 tasks.

Strategy use ¶

Selection and implementation of a cognitive procedure chosen to improve performance on a task. Engaged by 6 tasks.

Emotion Perception and Regulation ¶

Recognition of emotional signals (face, voice, body), affective priming, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, emotion regulation strategies.

Affective priming ¶

Facilitation or interference in evaluating a target by a valence-related prime. Engaged by 1 task.

Cognitive reappraisal ¶

Reinterpretation of an emotional stimulus to change its affective impact. Engaged by 1 task.

Emotion recognition ¶

Identification of emotional states from cues such as facial expression or vocal prosody. Engaged by 7 tasks.

Emotion regulation ¶

Processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when, and how they experience and express them. Engaged by 5 tasks.

Expressive suppression ¶

Inhibition of outward behavioral expression of emotion. Engaged by 1 task.

Face and Object Perception ¶

Processes that recover identity, category, or structure from sensory form: face identity, face perception, visual object recognition, visual form recognition, visual perception, pattern recognition, motion perception (including biological motion), depth perception; plus the non-visual object-perception rows (somatosensory, gustatory, olfactory, proprioceptive) that have no better home.

Biological motion perception ¶

Recognition of animate motion from sparse kinematic cues, such as point-light displays. Engaged by 1 task.

Depth perception ¶

Perception of distance and three-dimensional structure from monocular and binocular cues. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Face identity recognition ¶

Identification of an individual from face-specific features. Engaged by 1 task.

Face perception ¶

Recognition and processing of faces as a specialized perceptual category; N170-sensitive, FFA-dependent. Engaged by 5 tasks.

Gustatory perception ¶

Perception of taste qualities (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami). Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Motion perception ¶

Detection and interpretation of moving stimuli; includes global motion and optic flow. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Olfactory perception ¶

Perception of odor via the olfactory system. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Pattern recognition ¶

Categorization of sensory input according to its structure. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Somatosensory perception ¶

Perception of bodily sensations, including touch, proprioception, temperature, and pain. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Visual form recognition ¶

Assignment of visual input to a shape category prior to semantic identification. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Visual object recognition ¶

Identification of objects from visual input, invariant over viewpoint, size, and lighting. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Visual perception ¶

Perception of visual information; includes form, motion, depth, color, and spatial layout. Engaged by 12 tasks.

Implicit and Statistical Learning ¶

Acquisition of structure without explicit instruction: implicit memory, procedural memory. Paradigm-level coverage includes artificial grammar learning, serial reaction time, statistical word-segmentation, perceptual category learning — these live in task_details.json, not as separate process rows.

Implicit memory ¶

Memory expressed without conscious recollection, measurable by priming, skill learning, and conditioning. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Procedural memory ¶

Non-declarative memory for skills and procedures, expressed through improved performance rather than conscious recollection. Engaged by 5 tasks.

Inhibitory Control and Conflict Monitoring ¶

Response inhibition, response conflict, conflict monitoring, interference control, executive attention, proactive control, reactive control, error detection, error correction.

Conflict monitoring ¶

Detection of co-activation of incompatible response tendencies, proposed to recruit anterior cingulate cortex and trigger cognitive control. Engaged by 9 tasks.

Error correction ¶

Adjustment of behavior following an error, including post-error slowing and improvement on subsequent trials. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Error detection ¶

Recognition that a response was incorrect, indexed by the error-related negativity (ERN) and by error awareness. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Executive attention ¶

Resolution of conflict among thoughts, feelings, and responses; one of Posner’s three attentional networks. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Interference control ¶

Resistance to interference from task-irrelevant stimuli or competing response representations, measured by Stroop, Flanker, and Simon effects. Engaged by 9 tasks.

Proactive control ¶

Sustained, anticipatory maintenance of task goals that biases processing in preparation for an expected demand. Engaged by 1 task.

Reactive control ¶

Transient, stimulus-triggered engagement of control after interference or conflict is detected. Engaged by 1 task.

Response conflict ¶

Competing activation of two or more response representations on a single trial, typically engaging cognitive control. Engaged by 7 tasks.

Response inhibition ¶

Suppression of a prepotent or already-initiated response when it becomes inappropriate, indexed behaviorally by stop-signal reaction time or commission errors. Engaged by 11 tasks.

Language Comprehension and Production ¶

Mapping sound or text to meaning and meaning to articulation: lexical access, word recognition, reading, phonological processes, syntactic parsing, sentence comprehension, discourse processing, semantic processing, semantic knowledge, naming, verbal fluency, speech perception, speech production, language comprehension, language production.

Discourse processing ¶

Integration of sentences into coherent representations of extended text or conversation. Engaged by 1 task.

Language comprehension ¶

Extraction of meaning from linguistic input (spoken, written, or signed). Engaged by 2 tasks.

Language production ¶

Generation of spoken, written, or signed linguistic output, from message to articulation. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Lexical access ¶

Retrieval of word-level representations (form and meaning) from memory. Engaged by 7 tasks.

Naming ¶

Production of a word label for a presented stimulus (e.g., picture naming). Engaged by 1 task.

Phonological awareness ¶

Explicit awareness of the sound structure of spoken words (onsets, rimes, phonemes). Engaged by 1 task.

Phonological encoding ¶

Assembly of phonological representations during language production. Engaged by 1 task.

Reading ¶

Visual processing of written text, integrating orthography, phonology, and meaning. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Semantic knowledge ¶

Long-term store of facts, concepts, and word meanings. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Semantic processing ¶

Access and integration of word and phrase meaning, indexed by the N400. Engaged by 8 tasks.

Sentence comprehension ¶

Integration of lexical, syntactic, and semantic information to derive sentence meaning. Engaged by 1 task.

Speech perception ¶

Extraction of linguistic content from the acoustic speech signal, including phoneme categorization, word segmentation, and prosodic processing. Engaged by 1 task.

Speech production ¶

Planning and articulation of spoken output; the motor component of articulation is covered under vocal-motor control in Motor Preparation, Timing, and Execution. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Syntactic parsing ¶

Assignment of hierarchical grammatical structure to a linguistic input. Engaged by 1 task.

Verbal fluency ¶

Rapid generation of words under a semantic or phonemic constraint. Engaged by 1 task.

Word recognition ¶

Identification of a word as a lexical item from its perceptual input. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Long-Term Memory ¶

Encoding, consolidation, retrieval; recall and recognition; recollection and familiarity; source memory; episodic, semantic, autobiographical, verbal memory; pattern completion and separation; proactive and retroactive interference; forgetting; directed forgetting; reconsolidation; prospective memory.

Autobiographical memory ¶

Memory for personally experienced events across the lifespan, integrating episodic and semantic components. Engaged by 1 task.

Consolidation ¶

Post-encoding stabilization of memory traces, dependent on time and often on sleep; includes synaptic and systems consolidation. Engaged by 1 task.

Declarative memory ¶

Consciously accessible memory for facts and events; encompasses semantic and episodic memory. Engaged by 1 task.

Directed forgetting ¶

Reduced memory for items that have been cued to be forgotten, relative to items cued to be remembered. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Encoding ¶

Processes by which perceptual input is transformed into a memory representation at acquisition. Engaged by 13 tasks.

Episodic memory ¶

Memory for specific events located in a particular place and time and accompanied by autonoetic consciousness. Engaged by 6 tasks.

Familiarity ¶

Sense that a stimulus has been encountered before, in the absence of retrieval of contextual detail. Engaged by 5 tasks.

Forgetting ¶

Loss of accessibility of previously encoded information, due to decay, interference, or retrieval failure. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Pattern completion ¶

Retrieval of a complete memory from a partial or degraded cue; CA3 function. Engaged by 1 task.

Pattern separation ¶

Transformation of similar input patterns into distinct, non-overlapping memory representations; dentate gyrus function. Engaged by 1 task.

Proactive interference ¶

Disruption of new learning by previously learned material. Engaged by 1 task.

Prospective memory ¶

Memory for intentions to act at a future time or on a future event. Engaged by 1 task.

Recall ¶

Retrieval of items without an external cue provided at test (free or cued recall). Engaged by 3 tasks.

Recognition ¶

Judgment that a test item has been previously encountered; supported by familiarity and recollection. Engaged by 5 tasks.

Recollection ¶

Retrieval of contextual detail about a prior event, including source information. Engaged by 5 tasks.

Reconsolidation ¶

Destabilization and re-stabilization of a memory upon retrieval, creating a window for modification. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Retrieval ¶

Reactivation of a stored memory representation; dissociable into cue-driven and strategic retrieval. Engaged by 14 tasks.

Retroactive interference ¶

Disruption of older memories by newly learned material. Engaged by 1 task.

Semantic memory ¶

Long-term store of general knowledge about the world — facts, concepts, and word meanings — dissociable from episodic memory and supported by distributed cortical representations. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Source memory ¶

Memory for the contextual origin of information (e.g., who said it, where it was seen). Engaged by 1 task.

Verbal memory ¶

Memory for linguistic material (words, sentences), tested via word lists, story recall, and RAVLT. Engaged by 1 task.

Motor Preparation, Timing, and Execution ¶

Motor planning, response selection, motor preparation, action initiation, response execution, motor timing, motor sequence learning, motor memory, visuomotor adaptation, fine motor control, reaching, grasping, saccade, antisaccade, proprioception, vocal-motor control.

Action initiation ¶

Triggering of an action after planning is complete. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Antisaccade ¶

Voluntary eye movement away from a peripheral stimulus, requiring inhibition of a prepotent saccade. Engaged by 1 task.

Fine motor control ¶

Precise control of small-amplitude movements, typically of the hand and fingers. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Grasping ¶

Shaping and closure of the hand around an object. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Motor memory ¶

Long-term retention of motor skills and procedures. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Motor planning ¶

Specification of movement parameters before execution. Engaged by 4 tasks.

Motor preparation ¶

Neural readiness state preceding movement, indexed by the readiness potential and LRP. Engaged by 5 tasks.

Motor sequence learning ¶

Acquisition of a skilled sequence of movements through repetition. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Motor timing ¶

Production or estimation of temporal intervals in motor output. Engaged by 1 task.

Proprioception ¶

Perception of body position and movement from muscle, tendon, and joint receptors. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Reaching ¶

Goal-directed arm movement toward a spatial target. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Response execution ¶

Overt production of a selected response in accordance with task demands. Engaged by 8 tasks.

Response selection ¶

Choice of an action from a set of alternatives. Engaged by 11 tasks.

Saccade ¶

Rapid ballistic eye movement between points of fixation. Engaged by 1 task.

Visuomotor adaptation ¶

Recalibration of movement in response to perturbations of the mapping between vision and action. Engaged by 1 task.

Vocal-motor control ¶

Control of the articulators for speech production and vocalization. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Perceptual Decision-Making (Evidence Accumulation)¶

Integration of noisy sensory evidence to a decision criterion.

Perceptual decision making ¶

Integration of noisy sensory evidence toward a decision criterion, modeled by sequential-sampling frameworks (drift-diffusion, race models) and indexed by accuracy and response-time distributions. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Reasoning and Problem-Solving ¶

Deductive, inductive, causal, analogical, mathematical reasoning; hypothesis testing; categorization; insight; means-ends analysis; planning; subgoaling.

Analogical reasoning ¶

Mapping of relational structure from a source domain to a target domain. Engaged by 1 task.

Categorization ¶

Assignment of instances to categories according to their features. Engaged by 8 tasks.

Causal reasoning ¶

Inference about cause–effect relations from observation and intervention. Engaged by 1 task.

Deductive reasoning ¶

Inference in which the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. Engaged by 1 task.

Hypothesis testing ¶

Generation and evaluation of alternative explanations against evidence. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Inductive reasoning ¶

Inference from specific instances to general principles; probabilistic rather than necessary. Engaged by 1 task.

Insight ¶

Sudden restructuring of a problem representation yielding a solution that was previously unavailable, often accompanied by an “Aha!” experience distinct from incremental analytic search. Engaged by 1 task.

Mathematical reasoning ¶

Manipulation of numerical and algebraic quantities and relations. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Means-ends analysis ¶

Iterative problem-solving strategy in which the distance between the current state and the goal state is reduced by selecting operators that diminish the largest remaining difference. Engaged by 1 task.

Planning ¶

Mental formulation of a sequence of actions toward a goal before execution. Engaged by 1 task.

Subgoaling ¶

Decomposition of a goal into an ordered sequence of subgoals whose satisfaction advances the overall task; dissociable from means-ends search and often studied through hierarchical task analysis. Engaged by 1 task.

Reward Anticipation and Motivation ¶

Anticipation of reward, consumption of reward, incentive salience, effort allocation, approach motivation, avoidance motivation.

Approach motivation ¶

Tendency to engage with stimuli associated with positive outcomes. Engaged by 7 tasks.

Avoidance motivation ¶

Tendency to disengage from stimuli associated with negative outcomes. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Effort allocation ¶

Decision to expend physical or cognitive effort as a function of expected reward and cost. Engaged by 1 task.

Incentive salience ¶

“Wanting” attributed to reward-predictive cues, distinct from “liking.” Engaged by 2 tasks.

Reward anticipation ¶

Affective and neural response to cues predicting upcoming reward. Engaged by 4 tasks.

Reward consumption ¶

Affective and neural response to receipt of reward. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.

Selective and Sustained Attention ¶

Attention networks (alerting, orienting, executive attention); selective attention; sustained attention; attention shifting; attentional capture; divided attention; feature-based attention; object-based attention; spatial attention; temporal attention.

Alerting ¶

Achieving and maintaining a state of readiness to respond, whether tonic or phasic; one of Posner’s three attentional networks. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Attention shifting ¶

Reorienting of attention from one location, feature, or object to another, indexed by cost in RT or accuracy. Engaged by 1 task.

Attentional capture ¶

Involuntary shift of attention to a salient stimulus that is not the current target of task-directed attention. Engaged by 4 tasks.

Divided attention ¶

Concurrent processing of two or more streams of information or two tasks, typically yielding dual-task interference. Engaged by 4 tasks.

Feature-based attention ¶

Selection of a specific visual feature (e.g., a color, orientation, or motion direction) that enhances processing of that feature throughout the visual field. Engaged by 1 task.

Object-based attention ¶

Selection of an object as a unit of attention such that the attended features belonging to the object are processed together. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Orienting ¶

Selection of information from sensory input, typically in space, by covert or overt shifts of attention; one of Posner’s three attentional networks. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Selective attention ¶

Prioritized processing of a task-relevant subset of stimuli (a location, feature, object, or modality) with suppression of irrelevant stimuli. Engaged by 22 tasks.

Spatial attention ¶

Selection of a location in space for preferential sensory processing, measurable via cueing benefits and N2pc/P1 modulation. Engaged by 5 tasks.

Sustained attention ¶

Maintenance of attentional engagement over extended intervals during which targets are rare or responses are repetitive; synonymous with vigilance. Engaged by 8 tasks.

Temporal attention ¶

Selection of a point in time for preferential processing, measurable via cueing benefits in time and the attentional blink. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Short-Term and Working Memory ¶

Active maintenance, manipulation, working-memory updating, rehearsal, chunking; visual working memory; verbal working memory; spatial working memory; umbrella hed_working_memory.

Active maintenance ¶

Holding information active over a delay without manipulation, through volitional, attention-demanding processes; a core subprocess of working memory. Engaged by 7 tasks.

Chunking ¶

Binding of multiple items into a single unit in memory to expand effective capacity. Engaged by 1 task.

Manipulation ¶

Transformation of information held in working memory (reordering, reversing, combining) beyond simple maintenance. Engaged by 2 tasks.

Rehearsal ¶

Covert repetition of material to refresh its representation in short-term memory, especially for verbal material (articulatory rehearsal). Engaged by 2 tasks.

Spatial working memory ¶

Short-term storage of spatial locations and spatial relations. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Verbal working memory ¶

Short-term storage of phonological/verbal information, historically “phonological loop”; supports digit span, Sternberg with letters. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Visual working memory ¶

Short-term storage and manipulation of visual information; capacity limited to ~3–4 items. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Working memory ¶

System for the short-term maintenance, updating, and manipulation of task-relevant information over delays of seconds. Engaged by 7 tasks.

Working memory updating ¶

Replacement or revision of information currently held active in working memory with newly task-relevant content. One of three core executive functions in the Miyake et al. unity/diversity framework; decomposable into retrieval, transformation, and substitution subcomponents (Ecker et al.); implemented by a cortico-striatal gating mechanism that opens to admit new content and closes to protect maintenance. Distinct from long-term-memory reconsolidation (which occurs when retrieval triggers a prediction error and targets stored representations rather than the focus of attention). Indexed behaviorally by N-Back, running-span, and keep-track performance. Engaged by 3 tasks.

Value-Based Decision-Making Under Risk and Uncertainty ¶

Choice among options that differ in subjective value: valuation, value-based decision making, choice commitment, delay discounting, intertemporal choice, probability judgment, risk processing.

Choice commitment ¶

The act of locking in a selected option once accumulated evidence or value crosses a decision boundary; measured by response-time distributions, drift-diffusion boundary parameters, and motor preparation signatures. Engaged by no task in the current Catalog.