From “Hot” and “Cold” Cognition to New Directions in Cognitive Science

When I was in graduate school in psychology at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1970s, Professor Robert Abelson from Yale University gave a colloquium in our department. As I was on the colloquium committee (which was student run), I was asked to give his introduction. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the specifics of his talk. However, I do remember more about my introduction. I was quite nervous as this was my first time making any remarks in front of the whole department. Despite the nerves, I made an attempt at humor. I made some reference to his theory of “hot” and “cold” cognition (emotion-laden vs. neutral/logical cognition; Abelson, 1963; see Roseman & Reed, 2007) and said that he would be talking about “colder” aspects of knowledge representations (according to script theory; Schank & Abelson, 1977). Whatever it was I said, my remarks drew a laugh from the audience and later congratulations from faculty on giving a good introduction.  

I bring up this anecdote because it came to mind when thinking about current directions in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, some of which have been emphasizing “hotter” aspects of cognition. While reflecting on these new directions, I was reminded of the precedent in the work of Abelson from the early days of the cognitive revolution, which led me to recall his visit. It struck me that my own memory of the event was influenced by emotions, both positive and negative, with the most salient aspects of my memory being my anxiety in giving the introduction and my gratification at the audience’s positive reactions to it rather than any specific content of what was said. Nonetheless, I was able to access my memory for this talk and recall the general gist of what his approach had been. Given that I have very little recall for most of the other colloquia during my graduate years, it seems likely that my emotions provided cues to recall his visit that were absent for other talks (see Bower, 1981).  

Investigation of the effects of emotional and social factors on cognition has continued prominently from the early days in the areas of reasoning and decision-making, where the influences of social psychological factors such as group identity are often examined. However, in many other subareas of cognition, including memory, language, perception, and conceptual representations, studies on social–emotional factors have been relatively few. In my own area of the relation of language processing and working memory, the theories typically ignored such influences. (What could be more abstract than a model of syntactic processing in sentence comprehension?) The emotional salience of the verbal stimuli was something to be minimized or controlled for, not investigated. Words, sentences, and paragraphs presented to assess comprehension and memory were chosen to be neutral—that is, not evoking strong emotions. The feeling seemed to be that using emotion-evoking stimuli would bring in some “extra” processing, beyond the core cognitive mechanisms that were targeted, and these extra influences would no doubt be messy and difficult to accommodate in terms of theory.  

While I believe most psychologists would acknowledge the many important empirical and theoretical advances derived from cognitive research, the emphasis on “colder” aspects of cognition has led to some negative stereotypes about the field. My unscientific survey of a few colleagues inside and outside of cognition has suggested the following views:  

• The area is highly siloed, with practitioners having little interest or interaction with those in other areas of psychology. 
• The theories and experiments are too complex and are described in unfamiliar jargon, with little attempt by practitioners to make those outside the field understand their relation to everyday events.  
• The field has focused solely on general cognitive principles and ignored important individual differences, including cultural effects on cognition. 

In the last 10–15 years, however, I have become aware of a growing emphasis on social–emotional and cultural effects in cognition and cognitive neuroscience. I’ve observed experienced researchers changing their research foci and younger faculty in our department pursuing broader areas of study. These changes have been accompanied by shifts in the content of talks and symposia at conferences and the presentations of those invited to our department for colloquia. An example is the topic of how emotion affects memory at behavioral and neural levels, with better memory for emotional than neutral stimuli (e.g., Kensinger & Ford, 2020). Growing out of this research is work on how healthy aging or mental health and neurological conditions such as depression or Alzheimer’s disease may give rise to differential impacts of emotion on memory in the brain (e.g., James & Duarte, 2023; Kapoor et al., 2023; Leal et al., 2017; Mather, 2016). There is also ongoing work on how to recruit more diverse populations to examine whether group differences in the relation of emotion and cognition can be observed in, for instance, healthy aging or dementia (e.g., Hokett & Duarte, 2019; Sinha et al., 2018).  

My goal in this and subsequent columns is to bring these fascinating approaches and findings to the attention of the broad audience of APS members, as my feeling is that many may not be aware of these new directions. In future editorials, I plan to go into other topics suggesting the range of possible cross-area interactions, including the effects of group collaboration on individuals’ memory (e.g., Greeley & Rajaram, 2023), cultural effects on cognition (e.g., Estephan et al., 2018; Gutchess et al., 2010), the extent of developmental neural plasticity (e.g., Newport, 2022), and various implications from the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), such as whether and how large language models relate to human cognition (Antonello & Huth, 2024) and what determines the trust of AI vs. human decision-making (Bonezzi et al., 2022).

One hope is that such exposure will foster collaboration among APS members whose research focuses on social, cultural, health, organizational, or clinical aspects of psychological science and those carrying out these new directions in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience research. APS, with members from all areas of scientific psychology, could provide a forum for the discussion of cross-cutting research as well as opportunities for collaboration. All sides could benefit from interactions across areas. Even though cognitive psychology conferences are opening up, in terms of including topics related to social and emotional factors, not many of those attending come from other areas of psychology. Similarly, conferences with a clinical or health emphasis may include papers that deal with the cognitive causes or consequences of mental or physical health conditions but may have few attendees with expertise in the nuances of cognitive function and how these functions might be appraised beyond the use of standard assessment tools. At its meetings, APS provides exciting opportunities for discussion and interaction across traditional areas of psychology that are not available from more specialized conferences. APS is also looking for opportunities to further expand these opportunities.  

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