Understanding and predicting human cooperative behaviour and belief dynamics remains a major challenge both from the scientific and practical perspectives. Because of the complexity and multiplicity of material, social and cognitive factors involved, both empirical and theoretical work tends to focus only on some snippets of the puzzle. Recently, a mathematical theory has been proposed that integrates material, social and cognitive aspects of behaviour and beliefs dynamics to explain how people make decisions in social dilemmas within heterogeneous groups. Here we apply this theory in two countries, China and Spain, through four long-term behavioural experiments utilising the Common Pool Resources game and the Collective Risk game. Our results show that material considerations carry the smallest weight in decision-making, while personal norms tend to be the most important factor. Empirical and normative expectations have intermediate weight in decision-making. Cognitive dissonance, social projection, logic constraints and cultural background play important roles in both decision-making and beliefs dynamics. At the individual level, we observe differences in the weights that people assign to factors involved in the decision-making and belief updating process. We identify different types of prosociality and rule-following associated with cultural differences, various channels for the effects of messaging, and culturally dependent interactions between sensitivity to messaging and conformity. Our results can put policy and information design on firmer ground, highlighting the need for interventions tailored to the situation at hand and to individual characteristics. Overall, this work demonstrates the theoretical and practical power of the theory in providing a more comprehensive understanding of human behaviour and beliefs.

Decision quality is often evaluated based on whether decision makers can adequately explain the decision process. Accountability often improves judgment quality because decision makers weigh and integrate information more thoroughly, but it could also hurt judgment processes by disrupting retrieval of previously encountered cases. We investigated to what degree process accountability motivates decision makers to shift from retrieval of past exemplars to rule-based integration processes. This shift may hinder accurate judgments in retrieval-based configural judgment tasks (Experiment 1) but may improve accuracy in elemental judgment tasks requiring weighing and integrating information (Experiment 2). In randomly selected trials, participants had to justify their judgments. Process accountability neither changed how accurately people made a judgment, nor the judgment strategies. Justifying the judgment process only decreased confidence in trials involving a justification. Overall, these results imply that process accountability may affect judgment quality less than expected.

Implicit theories (also referred to self-theories) represent a cognitive conceptualization about a matter, generally raised as a belief. It is marked as the primary aspect of cognitive processing among living beings affecting their overall behavior towards others’. In the present study, it is attempted to consider a Pakistani perspective on this phenomenon of self-theories and also to validate the implicit theories Scale. It is a measure of people’s beliefs about things to be fixed or changeable. A quantitative approach of correlational methodology was employed. Participants of the study were 355 Pakistani young adults with an age range of 20–30 years (M = 23.08, SD = 1.99). There were 175 males and 180 females (as they reported their gender) from Islamabad. Confirmatory factor analysis was computed to assess the dimensionality of the scale. An adequate model fit indices were found as Root Mean Square Error of Approximation = .04, Comparative Fit Index = .99, Tucker-Lewis Index = .98, Goodness of Fit Index = .97, and Incremental Fit Index = .99, confirming a bidimensional implicit theories measure. The reliability coefficients of Entity Theory and Incremental Theory subscales were assessed through internal consistency and test-retest methods which are found to be in an acceptable range. Demographic specifications are also addressed to reflect upon the indigenous importance of this concept. This will be an additive feature in the literature to consider the cultural specification enabling individuals to align their mindsets in the desired direction of growth and achievement.

‘Design cognition’ refers to the mental processes and representations involved in designing, and has been a significant area of interest since the emergence of design research in the 1960s. The field now faces significant challenges moving into the future, with major change required to overcome stagnation in research topics and methodologies. Tackling these challenges requires us to understand the past and present of design cognition research, and open fresh discussions on its future. This thematic collection aims to address this need by taking stock of current approaches, exploring emerging topics and methodologies, and identifying future directions for enquiry. In this editorial, we examine key issues regarding both what we investigate and how we conduct this research. We present a vision formed from a structured literature review, the work of authors in the collection, and the views of a broad cross-section of the design cognition community. This vision is formalized in a roadmap from the present to the near and far future, highlighting key topics and research questions for the field. Ultimately, ecological measurement, new applications of artificial intelligence, and a move towards theory construction and research maturation constitute key long term challenges for the design cognition community.

This paper reports findings from the first systematic review of protocol studies focusing specifically on conceptual design cognition, aiming to answer the following research question: What is our current understanding of the cognitive processes involved in conceptual design tasks carried out by individual designers? We reviewed 47 studies on architectural design, engineering design and product design engineering. This paper reports 24 cognitive processes investigated in a subset of 33 studies aligning with two viewpoints on the nature of designing: (V1) design as search (10 processes, 41.7%); and (V2) design as exploration (14 processes, 58.3%). Studies on search focused on solution search and problem structuring, involving: long-term memory retrieval; working memory; operators and reasoning processes. Studies on exploration investigated: co-evolutionary design; visual reasoning; cognitive actions; and unexpected discovery and situated requirements invention. Overall, considerable conceptual and terminological differences were observed among the studies. Nonetheless, a common focus on memory, semantic, associative, visual perceptual and mental imagery processes was observed to an extent. We suggest three challenges for future research to advance the field: (i) developing general models/theories; (ii) testing protocol study findings using objective methods conducive to larger samples and (iii) developing a shared ontology of cognitive processes in design.

Towards addressing ontological issues in design cognition research, this paper presents the first generic classification of cognitive processes investigated in protocol studies on conceptual design cognition. The classification is based on a systematic review of 47 studies published over the past 30 years. Three viewpoints on the nature of design cognition are outlined (search, exploration and design activities), highlighting considerable differences in the concepts and terminology applied to describe cognition. To provide a more unified view of the cognitive processes fundamentally under study, we map specific descriptions of cognitive processes provided in protocol studies to more generic, established definitions in the cognitive psychology literature. This reveals a set of 6 categories of cognitive process that appear to be commonly studied and are therefore likely to be prevalent in conceptual design: (1) long-term memory; (2) semantic processing; (3) visual perception; (4) mental imagery processing; (5) creative output production and (6) executive functions. The categories and their constituent processes are formalised in the generic classification. The classification provides the basis for a generic, shared ontology of cognitive processes in design that is conceptually and terminologically consistent with the ontology of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In addition, the work highlights 6 key avenues for future empirical research: (1) the role of episodic and semantic memory; (2) consistent definitions of semantic processes; (3) the role of sketching from alternative theoretical perspectives on perception and mental imagery; (4) the role of working memory; (5) the meaning and nature of synthesis and (6) unidentified cognitive processes implicated in conceptual design elsewhere in the literature.

The appraisal model of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) suggests that six key appraisal domains contribute to the aetiology and maintenance of OCD symptoms. An accumulating body of evidence supports this notion and suggests that modifying cognitive appraisals may be beneficial in reducing obsessive-compulsive symptomatology. This literature review first summarises the nature of OCD and its treatment, followed by a summary of the existing correlational and experimental research on the role of cognitive appraisal processes in OCD across both adult and paediatric samples. While correlational data provide some support for the relationship between cognitive appraisal domains and OCD symptoms, results are inconclusive, and experimental methods are warranted to determine the precise causal relationship between specific cognitive appraisal domains and OCD symptoms.