Cognitive science is an umbrella discipline, uniting six core fields of study and including some others in a focus on the mind, intelligence, and how people reason. Information, knowledge, and concepts are all important in understanding how people make sense of the world. The six original core fields and the ones that have adopted cognitive science questions and methodologies from the core disciplines are shown in the accompanying figure.

Cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science (artificial intelligence) and philosophy have contributed the most from their core disciplines to the shared enterprise of cognitive science, but in recent years everyone has been looking to neuroscience researchers to find the biological "correlates" (or, depending on your views, "causes") of the cognitive phenomena observed by the other disciplines.

We don't want to stop asking people directly about what they think. After all, sometimes people know exactly why they are doing something. But all too often-psychology suggests perhaps even most of the time-people are not aware of all of their motivations and the structure of and behind their beliefs, thinking, and actions. In order to get a complete picture of why people believe what they believe, we need to use the tools of cognitive science and its insights about the structure and processes of thinking to understand what is not on the surface.

At American Environics we primarily use the tools of cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, joined with social psychology. Cognitive science and social psychology contribute new ways of thinking about age-old issues: knowledge, intentionality, reasoning, decision making, persuasion, and the idea of the self, for example. Cognitive linguistics as used here examines the structure of concepts and the way concepts are used in inferencing, often incorporating results from cognitive psychology, which examines mental processes involving perception, attention, categorization, knowledge representation, memory, learning, judgment, problem solving, and so on. Language is seen as a rich source of data and a powerful window into the mind, not studied for its own sake. Social psychology asks these questions in a context of interpersonal and group relations, and applies them to issues of prejudice, violence and altruism, authority, norms, gender, social identity, and similar topics.

The range of possible approaches to understanding how people think-how they take in, retain, and later return to and use information-can only be represented here by a few examples.

Please refer to our glossary for more information about the following cognitive terms.

The terms "frame" and "framing" are widely found, with a considerable number of related definitions, all stemming from Gregory Bateson's important observation that the behavior of monkeys that are playing and fighting are identical; the response to a bite, for example, depends on understanding which of these two frames is intended.

At American Environics, we more often use the term "frame" in a technically more restricted sense, borrowing from Charles Fillmore's "frame semantics." In this usage, a "frame" contains a small set of abstract roles. When a frame is applied to a particular situation, the roles have to be connected to fillers. For example, if we are thinking about health care as a consumer item, we are operating in the "Commercial Transaction" frame, with the roles of BUYER, SELLER, GOODS, and "MONEY" used to buy the goods. When we apply this abstract frame to health care in American today, we fill those roles: BUYER with ordinary Americans; SELLERS with hospitals, insurance companies, health care providers, and so on; GOODS with health care itself, and MONEY with dollars. Within this frame the role of government is complex, as our Herndon results indicate.

Frames do not only have roles-they also have presuppositions and entailments, which also drive how we reason about the issue. Anything that people believe as a part of the background to a frame is a "presupposition," or assumption. Anything that people believe as a result of that background and the frame is an "entailment," or logical consequence, including policy entailments. For example, the idea that buying and selling needs to take place against the backdrop of laws to protect against fraud is a presupposition of the Commercial Transaction frame. Our Herndon research indicates that people often see government as a protector, which leads to policy entailments such as increased regulation or other kinds of protective legislation to protect buyers from rapacious sellers.

People love stories. People tell stories to make one coherent whole of roles, presuppositions, and entailments; there are also many familiar types of stories that people retell to fit situations in the world. Stories also have roles and fillers; in the case of Katrina, for example, different groups told punishment stories that have the same roles and some of the same fillers. However, just having a couple of different fillers in the basic roles of the Punishment frame (punisher, punished, reason for punishment, the punishment) leads to very different sets of policy entailments about what should be done after Katrina (read the report).

Cognitive science has shown that we know far less about categories and categorization than we have long believed. For example, categories are not simply described in terms of black and white, in or out, by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, such as "A bird has feather and wings, lays eggs, and flies." Instead, categories have internal structure. Some members of a category are better examples of that category than others; they are "prototypes." For example, in most places a robin, is viewed as a "better example" of a bird than a penguin, as both intuition and experiments in cognitive psychology attest.

Categories also have defined relationships to each other; we now know that people respond more strongly to things that are in "basic level" categories than they do to more abstract or more detailed levels.

Attribution theory is a major area of research in social psychology, looking at why people make the kinds of explanations they do about the behavior of themselves and other people. For example, do they think that the reason a person acts in a certain way lies in the characteristics or traits of the person, or in factors in the external situation? Research has also identified common kinds of mistakes ("attribution errors" or biases) that people make when they assign reasons. For example, they may assume that others share their own thoughts, values, or personality, or they may overemphasize a person's characteristics or desires and underemphasize the effect of situational factors. Clearly, these kinds of errors have important policy implications in areas such as government assistance, education, and health care, to mention only a few.