Cognitive Science Comprehensive Review: Development, Language, Evolution, and the Brain

Comprehensive practice flashcards defining foundational vocabulary across cognitive development, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, and neuroimaging methods.

Nativism

The theoretical perspective proposing that many cognitive abilities and structures are innate or biologically predisposed rather than learned entirely from experience.

Empiricism

The theoretical perspective proposing that most cognitive abilities develop and are substantially shaped through learning, environmental exposure, and interactions with the environment.

Core Cognition Hypothesis

The proposal that humans possess certain specialized, domain-specific cognitive systems at birth or very early in development that allow infants to reason about particular categories of information before extensive experience.

Violation-of-Expectation Paradigm

An experimental looking-time method based on the assumption that infants look longer at surprising or unexpected events than at expected events, used to infer infant knowledge and expectations.

Object Permanence

The understanding that physical objects continue to exist even when they are hidden or no longer visible.

Solidity Principle

The physical expectation that solid objects cannot pass through one another or occupy the exact same space simultaneously.

Continuity Principle

The physical expectation that objects move along continuous paths through space and time rather than teleporting or appearing discontinuously.

Spatiotemporal Tracking

The cognitive ability to track individual objects based on their continuous movement through space and time.

Agent

An entity whose actions are interpreted in terms of internal goals, intentions, or purposes rather than purely physical mechanical forces.

Overimitation

The tendency of young children to copy another person's actions, including actions that are visibly unnecessary or irrelevant for accomplishing a stated goal.

Centration

The developmental tendency to focus on a single salient dimension of a situation while failing to integrate or consider other relevant dimensions or switch between rules.

Conservation

The understanding that an amount or quantitative property remains unchanged despite superficial transformations in appearance or arrangement, provided nothing is added or removed.

Dimensional Change Card Sorting Task

A developmental test of cognitive control where children sort cards first by one dimension (e.g., color) and then must switch to another dimension (e.g., shape).

Theory of Mind

The cognitive capacity to attribute mental states—such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and knowledge—to oneself and others, and to understand that others may have mental states different from one's own.

False Belief

A mental state or belief held by an individual that does not correspond to the actual state of reality.

Perceptual Access Reasoning

A heuristic strategy for predicting behavior based directly on whether an individual has or has not observed an event, rather than fully representing their internal mental belief states.

Metacognition

The capacity to think about, monitor, and evaluate one's own cognitive processes, knowledge, and limitations.

Ponzo Illusion

A geometric-optical illusion in which two horizontal lines of equal physical length appear unequal when placed between converging perspective lines.

Müller-Lyer Illusion

A visual illusion in which two lines of identical length appear different depending on whether arrowheads on their ends point inward or outward.

Ebbinghaus Illusion

A visual size illusion in which a central circle appears larger when surrounded by smaller circles and smaller when surrounded by larger circles.

Fusiform Face Area (FFA)

A functional region in the human ventral temporal cortex that responds selectively and robustly to faces compared to other visual object categories.

Face Inversion Effect

The empirical finding that human visual recognition is disproportionately impaired when faces are presented upside down compared to inverted inanimate objects.

Critical Period

A biologically delimited developmental window during which neural organization and learning are unusually sensitive and receptive to environmental experience.

Heritability ($h^2$)

A population statistic representing the proportion of total phenotypic variation in a trait attributable to genetic differences among individuals, defined as $\frac{\text{Genetic variance}}{\text{Total phenotypic variance}}$.

Equal Environments Assumption

The methodological assumption in twin studies that identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twin pairs experience environmentally comparable degrees of similarity relevant to the measured trait.

Genome-Wide Complex Trait Analysis (GCTA)

A genetic methodology that estimates trait heritability across large unrelated populations by directly comparing individuals' measured genomic similarity with their trait similarity.

Turkheimer's Three Laws of Behavioral Genetics

Three broad empirical generalizations: (1) all behavioral traits are heritable; (2) shared family environment explains less variation than genes; and (3) genes and shared environment leave substantial nonshared variation unexplained.

Gene-Environment Correlation

The association between genetic differences and the systematic exposure to different environmental experiences, occurring when inherited tendencies influence which environments individuals seek or evoke.

General Cognitive Ability ($g$ factor)

The statistical construct describing the common variance underlying individual performance across diverse reasoning, memory, and cognitive tasks.

Wilson Effect

The developmental phenomenon where the estimated heritability of general cognitive ability ($g$) increases with age from childhood into adulthood.

Polygenic Score

A single calculated metric that aggregates the estimated statistical associations of thousands of individual genetic variants across the genome to predict a complex outcome.

Epigenetics

The study of stable changes in gene regulation and expression that occur without alterations to the underlying inherited DNA sequence.

Adaptation (Evolutionary)

An inherited characteristic whose evolutionary origin and spread were directly shaped by natural selection because it enhanced reproductive success.

Spandrel (Evolutionary Byproduct)

A phenotypic characteristic that emerges as a secondary physical or developmental byproduct of another evolved feature, rather than being directly selected for its own adaptive function.

Phenotypic Plasticity

The capacity of a single invariant genotype to produce distinct observable phenotypes in response to different environmental conditions.

Pleiotropy

The biological phenomenon in which a single genetic variant influences multiple, often superficially unrelated phenotypic traits.

Polygenic Trait

A complex observable trait influenced by the combined additive effects and interactions of many different genetic variants across the genome.

Frequency-Dependent Selection

An evolutionary dynamic in which the selective fitness or advantage of a phenotype or strategy depends directly on how common or rare it is within the population.

Just-So Story

A plausible-sounding, speculative evolutionary narrative invented after an observation that lacks independent empirical support or falsifiable testing.

Assortative Mating

The non-random mating pattern where individuals pair with romantic partners who resemble them on specific traits such as education, values, or background.

Wason Selection Task

A four-card logic puzzle used to evaluate conditional deductive reasoning ($P \rightarrow Q$) and test cognitive hypotheses like evolved cheater-detection mechanisms.

Linguistic Competence

A speaker's unconscious, internalized computational knowledge of the grammar, phonology, and structure of their native language.

Productivity (Linguistics)

The capacity of human linguistic systems to generate and comprehend an infinite variety of novel, never-before-heard expressions using finite lexical and structural rules.

Phonology

The subfield of linguistics that studies how speech sounds are systematically organized, patterned, and contrasted within a specific language.

Phonological Inventory

The complete repertoire of distinct speech sounds (phonemes) recognized and used by a language to differentiate words.

Phonotactics

The language-specific rules and constraints governing which sequences, positions, and combinations of speech sounds are permissible within syllables and words.

Nucleus (Syllable)

The obligatory central structural core of a syllable, typically consisting of a vowel or syllabic consonant.

Onset (Syllable)

The consonant sound or cluster that precedes the syllable nucleus.

Coda (Syllable)

The consonant sound or sequence of consonants that follows the syllable nucleus.

Rhyme (Syllable)

The constituent of a syllable formed by the combination of the nucleus and any following coda.

Syntax

The system of grammatical rules and principles governing the hierarchical organization of words into phrases, clauses, and sentences.

Constituent

A word or cohesive group of words that functions as a single hierarchical unit within a sentence's syntactic tree structure.

Recursion

The linguistic property whereby a syntactic rule can apply iteratively to embed a grammatical constituent within another constituent of the identical type.

Phrase Structure Rules

Formal rewriting rules (e.g., $S \rightarrow NP \; VP$) that describe how abstract grammatical categories combine to construct hierarchical sentences.

Semantic Anomaly

A linguistic construction that conforms perfectly to structural syntactic rules but violates conceptual or semantic coherence (e.g., 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously').

Descriptive Grammar

The scientific linguistic description of how native speakers naturally and systematically use language in real-world contexts, without value judgments.

Prescriptive Grammar

Socially enforced rules and conventions dictating how speakers 'ought' to use language according to formal or prestigious standards.

Lexical Ambiguity

Ambiguity in sentence meaning resulting from a single word possessing multiple distinct definitions (e.g., 'ball' meaning a toy or a formal dance).

Structural Ambiguity

Ambiguity occurring when a single linear sequence of words can be assigned multiple distinct hierarchical syntactic structures.

Scope Ambiguity

Ambiguity arising from multiple possible logical relationships and relative orderings between quantifiers or operators (e.g., 'every' versus 'a').

Negative Polarity Item (NPI)

A lexical item (such as 'any', 'yet', or 'budge an inch') that is grammatically licensed only within specific semantic environments, such as downward-entailing contexts.

Entailment

A strict logical relationship ($A \models B$) where if proposition $A$ is true, proposition $B$ must necessarily also be true.

Upward Entailment

A semantic environment that licenses logical inference from a specific subset to a broader superset ($\text{Dogs} \subseteq \text{Pets}$).

Downward Entailment

A semantic environment that licenses logical inference from a broader superset down to a specific subset ($\text{Pets} \rightarrow \text{Dogs}$), licensing negative polarity items.

Generative Grammar

Chomsky's formal theoretical framework that models natural language as an explicit rule-based system capable of generating all well-formed grammatical sentences.

Formal Semantics

Montague's framework treating natural language as an interpreted formal system that assigns precise truth-conditional meanings to syntactic structures.

Truth Conditions

The precise state of affairs that would have to hold in the actual world for a declarative sentence to be evaluated as true.

Indeterminacy of Translation (Gavagai Problem)

Quine's philosophical problem demonstrating that any finite set of observational evidence is compatible with an infinite number of alternative word meanings.

Universal Grammar (UG)

Chomsky's hypothesized innate, human-specific biological language faculty that contains computational constraints facilitating rapid grammar acquisition.

Poverty of the Stimulus

The argument that the language input children experience is too impoverished and underdetermined to deduce complex grammatical rules without innate inductive biases.

Auxiliary Fronting

The syntactic transformation of moving the main clause's auxiliary verb to the front of a sentence to form a polar interrogative, relying on structure rather than linear word order.

Home Sign

A spontaneous gestural communication system invented by deaf children raised without access to a conventional sign language model, exhibiting structural regularities.

Pidgin

A simplified, non-native contact variety with limited vocabulary and variable grammar developed for basic communication between linguistically diverse populations.

Creole

A fully developed, systematic natural language with stable syntactic rules that emerges historically from a contact-language (pidgin) setting.

Domain-General Learning

The view that language is acquired using broad, multi-purpose cognitive mechanisms (such as pattern recognition, prediction, and statistical learning) rather than a dedicated modular grammar organ.

BabyLM Challenge

A machine learning benchmark evaluating whether language models trained on developmentally realistic data volumes ($10\text{M}$ to $100\text{M}$ words) can acquire human-like linguistic competence.

Compositionality

The linguistic semantic principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined systematically by the meanings of its parts and the rules used to combine them.

Displacement (Language)

The design feature of human language enabling communication about objects, events, concepts, and times that are spatially, temporally, or hypothetically distant from the immediate moment.

Joint Attention (Shared Attention)

The social-cognitive ability of two individuals to coordinate visual and cognitive focus on the same referent object while mutually acknowledging shared awareness.

Marr's Three Levels of Analysis

A framework for understanding information-processing systems at the Computational level (goal/purpose), Algorithmic/representational level (rules/data representations), and Implementation level (physical hardware/neural substrates).

Neuron

The primary electrically excitable biological cell of the nervous system responsible for integrating, processing, and transmitting information.

Soma

The central cell body of a neuron that contains the nucleus, sustains cellular metabolism, and integrates incoming electrical inputs.

Dendrite

Branching cellular extensions of a neuron specialized for receiving synaptic inputs and chemical signals from other neurons.

Axon

A long, slender neuronal projection that conducts all-or-none action potentials away from the soma toward target synaptic junctions.

Synapse

The specialized biological junction across which an axon terminal of a presynaptic neuron communicates chemically or electrically with a postsynaptic target cell.

Membrane Potential

The electrical voltage difference across a neuron's lipid membrane resulting from unequal ion distributions between the inside and outside of the cell.

Action Potential

A rapid, transient, all-or-none electrical depolarization spike that propagates along a neuron's axon when the membrane potential reaches a critical threshold.

Synaptic Weight

A measure of the functional strength, magnitude, and efficacy of an individual synapse in altering the postsynaptic membrane potential.

Excitatory Input

A synaptic signal that depolarizes the postsynaptic membrane, driving the voltage closer to the firing threshold and increasing spike likelihood.

Inhibitory Input

A synaptic signal that hyperpolarizes the postsynaptic cell or shunts current, pushing the voltage away from threshold and decreasing spike likelihood.

Nonlinear Dendritic Integration

The property where spatial arrangements and clustered activations of neighboring dendritic synapses generate local electrical amplifications greater than their simple linear arithmetic sum.

Receptive Field

The specific region of sensory space or pattern of stimulation in which an appropriate physical stimulus modifies the firing rate of a given neuron.

Center-Surround Receptive Field

A spatial receptive field organization where stimulation in the circular center excites (or inhibits) the neuron while stimulation in the annular surround produces the opposite effect, enhancing edge and contrast detection.

Lateral Inhibition

A neural circuit motif wherein active neurons inhibit neighboring neurons, sharpening borders, enhancing contrast, and facilitating winner-take-all competition.

Recurrent Excitation

A feedback circuit mechanism where mutually connected excitatory neurons stimulate each other, sustaining representations and holding information across delays.

Recurrent Inhibition

A feedback mechanism where an active neuron stimulates an inhibitory interneuron that loops back to suppress the original neuron, terminating firing and stabilizing the network.

Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP)

A biological synaptic learning rule where a connection is strengthened if the presynaptic neuron fires shortly before the postsynaptic neuron, but weakened if it fires shortly after.

Ephaptic Coupling

Direct nonsynaptic communication between adjacent neurons mediated by local extracellular electric fields.

Orientation Map

The continuous topographic spatial layout across the visual cortex where neighboring cortical neurons share similar preferred line orientation angles, often converging in pinwheel arrangements.

Retinotopic Map

The orderly spatial mapping in visual cortex that preserves the topological and geometric coordinate relationships of the visual field as projected on the retina.