── ── Mental model
Cognitive Science Landscape
Eight interconnected domains constitute human cognition: (1) Perception & Attention, (2) Memory, (3) Language & Thought, (4) Decision Making & Judgment, (5) Metacognition, (6) Emotion & Cognition, (7) Social Cognition, (8) Creativity & Innovation. Treating them in isolation produces local improvements systematically undermined by adjacent unaddressed weaknesses. The skill is NOT listing all eight domains — it is identifying which…
How it works
1. Describe the failure in behavioral terms — not "bad at decisions" but "I underweight low-probability risks under time pressure." 2. Primary domain identification — match to one of 8: Perception & Attention / Memory / Language & Thought / Decision Making & Judgment / Metacognition / Emotion & Cognition / Social Cognition / Creativity & Innovation. 3. Map upstream influences — which domains feed into the primary failure? Name the specific mechanism. 4. Prioritize by cascade — which ONE upstream domain, if improved, cascades to the most other domains? That gets the first intervention. 5. Select domain-appropriate tools — Attention: focus training. Memory: spaced repetition. Emotion: cognitive reappraisal. Decision: structured frameworks. Do NOT cross domains. 6. Reassess — after 4–6 weeks re-run the audit. New bottleneck?
Gate: Complete upstream map before tool selection. Stop-rule: Treating a symptom domain without identifying upstream cause → stop, re-run Step 3.
When to use it
- user says 'I want to improve my thinking,' 'why does my decision-making keep failing,' 'how do I optimize my cognitive performance,' 'what's the full picture of how the mind works,' or is about to apply a single cognitive intervention without understanding which domain is the bottleneck
When not to use it
When the decision is routine and reversible, applying a formal method costs more than it returns.
Worked example
The 1956 MIT Symposium and the Birth of Cognitive Science (1956)
Before 1956, what we now call cognition was studied in isolated disciplinary silos. Behaviorism (Watson, Skinner) studied only observable behavior and explicitly excluded mental processes. Neurology studied brain structure without behavioral integration. Linguistics studied language without reference to the mental processes generating it. These disciplines could not explain each other's phenomena.
Install this skill (free, MIT)
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills