Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
36 results found in Cognitive.
- Perceptual Integration (Perceptual Binding)
- The process by which the brain combines information arriving through different sensory channels — vision, hearing, touch, proprioception — into a single coherent percept of an object or event. Percept…
- Perceptual Learning (Visual Perceptual Learning, PL)
- A long-studied phenomenon in vision science in which repeated exposure to, or training on, specific perceptual features — color, orientation, spatial location, shape — produces durable improvements in…
- Planning Fallacy
- A well-documented cognitive bias, identified by Kahneman and Tversky and elaborated by Buehler and colleagues, in which people systematically underestimate how long their own tasks will take and overe…
- Restricted Interests (Circumscribed Interests, Special Interests, Focused Interests)
- A characteristic of autism spectrum disorder where individuals develop intense, narrowly focused interests in specific topics, objects, or activities. These interests may be unusual in their subject m…
- Self-Insight
- The capacity to accurately understand one's own emotions, motivations, strengths, and patterns of thought and behaviour. Self-insight is a core outcome of therapy, journaling, and reflective practice,…
- Self-Reflection (Reflective Practice)
- The deliberate process of examining one's own thoughts, feelings, actions, and experiences to gain insight, adjust behaviour, or support personal growth. Self-reflection is central to therapeutic mode…
- Semantic Network (Semantic Web, Associative Network)
- A knowledge representation structure in which concepts are represented as nodes and the relationships between them as links or edges. In accessibility and AAC contexts, semantic networks model how wor…
- Sensemaking (Sense-making)
- The cognitive and social process of giving structure to ambiguous, incomplete, or unfamiliar information so that one can act on it. In HCI and information science, sensemaking is studied as iterative …
- Sensory-Motor Processing (Sensorimotor Processing, Sensorimotor Integration)
- Sensory-motor processing refers to the brain's ability to receive sensory input (visual, auditory, tactile, proprioceptive) and coordinate appropriate motor responses. This includes fine motor control…
- Shared Visual Attention (Collective Visual Attention, Visual Joint Attention)
- A core feature of Deaf-centred interaction in which all participants coordinate their gaze, body orientation, and signing space so everyone can see the current signer, referenced content, and each oth…
- Spatial Reasoning
- The cognitive process of understanding where objects are, how they are oriented, and how they relate to each other in three-dimensional space. Spatial reasoning is central to tasks like assembling pro…
- Speech Prosodics (Prosodic Features, Suprasegmental Features)
- Speech prosodics refers to the nonverbal acoustic features of speech that convey meaning beyond the words themselves, including pitch (fundamental frequency), rhythm, stress, intonation patterns, paus…
- Unity Assumption
- A concept from multisensory-perception research (Welch and Warren, 1980; Welch, 1999) describing the observer's implicit judgement that signals arriving through different senses originate from the sam…
- Visual Dispersion (Visual Attention Splitting, Gaze Switching)
- The challenge faced by deaf and hard of hearing individuals when they must divide their visual attention between multiple simultaneous information sources, such as a speech-to-text display, presentati…
- Visual-Spatial Processing (Visuospatial Processing, Visual-Spatial Cognition)
- Visual-spatial processing is the cognitive ability to perceive, analyze, and mentally manipulate spatial relationships and visual information. It encompasses skills such as judging distances, understa…
- Word-Finding Difficulty (Word-Finding Deficit, Word Retrieval Difficulty)
- A language impairment characterised by difficulty retrieving specific words during conversation or communication, despite the person knowing the word and its meaning. Word-finding difficulties are a h…