A document issued by the British government setting out its position with a view to legislation or executive control. It is a command in two respects. Historically, the British government is the constitutional expression of the commands of the British monarch. Formally, any command is a particular type of regulation and so has normative properties. …
Author Archives: Brian Hopkins
Common coding
A recent hypothesis in cognitive neuroscience, put forward by Wolfgang Prinz in 1997, stating that perception and action are not independent systems, but rather share resources and mutually influence each other. Thus, action perception and action planning draw on common psychological codes and amodal representational frameworks. As suggested by Prinz, common coding may most appropriately …
Collective agency
Agency isthe capacity of individuals to behave as autonomous agents, pursuing particulargoals and interests by using tools in the form of material objects, symbolicsystems and personal skills. Collective agency refers to the way in whichgroups or collections of agents pursue common or conflicting goals (orcombinations of such goals) by behaving as interacting autonomous agents, usingindividual …
Colic
This term refers to prolonged, unexplained crying in 1-3 month-old infants. It is poorly defined and may be used to refer to amounts of crying, to the inference that the crying is caused by gastrointestinal pain, or to the reports of parents that the crying is a problem. Here, it is used broadly to refer …
Collagen
A long, insoluble fibrous structural protein found in the extracellular matrix and in connective tissue, having different functions than those of globular proteins such as enzymes. In fact, it is one of the most common proteins in mammals, making up some 25% of the total number of proteins in the body. It consists of bundles …
Cohort effect
A characterisation of a group such as the mean of a variable or an association between variables that changes for persons born at different times or places. In cross-sectional studies, this effect can give rise to inappropriate conclusions about the nature of developmental change. A well-worn example is finding that IQ appears to decline with …
Cohen’s kappa coefficient
100 Values between parentheses are the expected frequencies or chance associations See Cronbach’s alpha, Inter-rater reliability, Measurment efficacy, Reliability
Cohort
A number of people who share a common characteristic linked to a specified place and time (e.g., born in a particular geographical location over a specified time period or the year of marriage). There are many different kinds of cohorts, examples being: the birth cohort of 1958 is comprised of all individuals born in that …
Cognitive structures
General principles or concepts that underpin knowledge, reasoning and understanding. For learning to occur, it must be incorporated into existing cognitive structures, from which it follows that new experiences and prior knowledge overlap. See Behavior mechanism, Bourbaki, Cognition, Cognitive development, Reasoning (psychology), Scheme, Sensorimotor realm
Cognitive psychology
The branch of psychology that studies the processes and mechanisms underlying all forms of cognition, mainly by experimental methods. To begin with, it was based on testing information-processing models of cognitive functioning, but in recent years these models have been challenged by dynamical systems approaches and the theory of embodiment. The term appeared for the …