Quotes About Cognition

retrieval, spacing, interleaving, variation, reflection, and elaboration.

The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory.

The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval

the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it.

When retrieval practice is spaced, allowing some forgetting to occur between tests, it leads to stronger long-term retention than when it is massed.

Humans do not give greater credence to an objective record of a past event than to their subjective remembering of it, and we are surprisingly insensitive to the ways our particular construals of a situation are unique to ourselves. Thus the narrative of memory becomes central to our intuitions regarding the judgments we make and the actions we take. 5

The paradox is that those students who employ the least effective study strategies overestimate their learning the most and, as a consequence of their misplaced confidence, they are not inclined to change their habits.

central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of forgetting.2

when the mind has to work, learning sticks better.

Ease of retrieval after a delay, however, is a good indicator of learning.)

rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery.

People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.

Spaced and interleaved exposure characterizes most of humans' normal experience.

In another surprise, when letters are omitted from words in a text, requiring the reader to supply them, reading is slowed, and retention improves.

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought.

You are so much smarter than me, aren't you?" "No. I just think things through quicker, that's all." "If that's not a definition of smart, I don't know what is.

interpret their own and others' behavior by attributing mental states

playing with reality, making the real unreal and vice versa, is the principal avenue for the development of mentalization.

Mentalization—a concept that is familiar in developmental circles—is the process by which we realize that having a mind mediates our experience of the

The primacy of cognition over affect was a cornerstone of the theoretical framework that organized the work of early cognitive behavioral therapists

affects ought to be studied in their own right, and that they constitute an independent sphere of knowledge—distinct from perception, cognition, and memory. According to Tomkins, affects are primary biological motivating mechanisms and can, thus, be understood as having primacy in human agency.

octopuses, far more than rats and pigeons, have their own ideas:

What does it feel like to be an octopus? To be a jellyfish? Does it feel like anything at all? Which were the first animals whose lives felt like something to them?