Figure 2.

Mapping between various tools and the most related cognitive concepts. A taxonomy mind-map of tools to analyse cognitive phenomena, broadly decomposed into deterministic and statistical. The deterministic toolset further consists of dynamical and algorithmic sub-categories, while the statistical set consists of the information-theoretic and least-action principles sub-categories (see §3a–e for detailed explanation). The mapping between the tools and the cognitive phenomena is not necessarily one-to-one. For example, the dynamical concept of ‘attractor’ can be used to study both the cognitive concepts of ‘decision-making’ and ‘memory’. We explain some of the cognitive phenomena and the tools mentioned here in §§2 and 3; for definitions of those not described in those sections we refer the reader to the Glossary (box 1). Moreover, the list of tools and phenomena shown here is not exhaustive. For example, the well-known ‘Hamilton's principle’ (Glossary) is a type of least-action principle that belongs to the dynamical systems toolset (not shown here). Finally, the mappings between the tools and the phenomena that could be studied with them are proposals, some of which are described in §3. (Online version in colour.)