Cold Cognition edit Cold cognition is essentially the lack of emotional influence in cognitive process 1 Decision making with cold cognition is more likely to involve logic and critical analysis 2 Therefore when an individual engages in a task when displaying cold cognition the stimuli is likely to be emotionally neutral and the outcome of the test is not motivationally relevant to the individual 1 An example of a critical decision using cold cognition would be concentrating on the evidence before drawing a conclusion Cold Assessment edit The cool tasks are neutrally affective and measure executive function abilities such as cognitive flexibility and working memory In other words there is nothing to be gained or lost by performing these tasks The hot tasks also measure executive function but these tasks result in emotionally significant consequences 3 Self Ordered Pointing In this task an array of items is presented to participants The position of these items then randomly changes from trial to trial Participants are instructed to point to one of these items but then asked to not point to that same item again In order to perform well on this task participants must remember what item they pointed to and use this information to decide on subsequent responses Wisconsin Card Sort Task WCST The Wisconsin Card Sort Task requires participants to sort stimulus cards that differ in dimensions shape colour or number However they are not told how to sort them The only feedback they receive is whether or not a match is correct Participants must discover the rule according to dimension Once the participant matches a certain number of correct cards the dimension changes and they must rediscover the new rule This requires participants to remember the rule they were using and cognitively change the rule by which they use to sort Dimensional Change Card Sort Task DCCS Participants are required to sort stimulus cards based on either shape or colour They are first instructed to sort based on one dimension colour in a trial and then it switches to the other shape in the following trial Switch trials are also used where the participant must change back and forth between rules within a single trial Unlike the WCST the rule is explicitly stated and does not have to be inferred The task measures how flexible participants are to changing rules This requires participants to shift between dimensions of sorting Hot Page edit Hot and cold cognition form a dichotomy within executive functioning Executive functioning has long been considered as a domain general cognitive function but there has been support for separation into hot affective aspects and cold cognitive aspects 4 It is recognized that executive functioning spans across a number of cognitive tasks including working memory cognitive flexibility and reasoning in active goal pursuit The distinction between hot and cool cognition implies that executive function may operate differently in different contexts 3 Hot and cold cognition have been applied to research in cognitive psychology developmental psychology clinical psychology social psychology neuropsychology and other areas of study in psychology Hot cognition is a hypothesis on motivated reasoning in which a person s thinking is influenced by their emotional state Put simply hot cognition is cognition coloured by emotion 5 It is proposed to be associated with cognitive and physiological arousal in which a person is more responsive to environmental factors As it is automatic rapid and led by emotion 6 hot cognition may consequently cause biased and low quality decision making 7 Hot cognition may arise with varying degrees of strength in politics religion and other sociopolitical contexts because of moral issues which are inevitably tied to emotion 5 Hot cognition was initially proposed in 1963 by Robert P Abelson This idea became popular in the 1960s and the 1970s An example of a biased decision caused by hot cognition would be a juror disregarding evidence because of an attraction to the defendant 5 Development and Neuroanatomy edit Performance on hot and cold tasks improves most rapidly during the preschool years 3 but continues into adolescence This co occurs with both structural and functional development associated with the prefrontal cortex 8 Specific areas within the PFC are thought to be associated with both hot and cold cognition Hot cognition is likely to be utilized during tasks that require the regulation of emotion or motivation as well as reevaluating the motivational significance of a stimulus The ventral and medial areas of the prefrontal cortex VM PFC are implicated during these tasks Cold cognition is thought to be associated with executive functions elicited by abstract decon