motivation

Like any science, cognitive science rests upon a set of conceptual foundations. Traditionally, cognition has been compartmentalized into distinct processes such as perception, memory, attention, emotion, cognitive control, language, and others. Further, the disciplines studying these different constructs have developed their own conceptual systems. For example, emotion science studies anger, fear, and happiness, whereas memory research has articulated varieties such as long-term, short-term, working, and episodic memory. These conceptual systems serve as key scientific tools, influencing processes from the development of new measurement instruments and deciding on which experiments to conduct to developing new theories and communicating results (Feest, 2010; Dubova & Goldstone, 2023). Although critically important for scientific progress, these concepts, often stemming from the folk taxonomies or the perspectives of early visionaries, have not always been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. To address these issues, cognitive scientists are beginning to critically re-evaluate and possibly reframe the conceptual underpinnings of cognitive disciplines (e.g. Cisek, 2019; Poldrack et al., 2011; Musslick et al., 2020), yet such efforts often lack strategic direction and widely diverge in their methodological ways of approaching the task.