Hot cognition is a hypothesis on motivated reasoning in which a person's thinking is influenced by their emotional state.
As it is automatic, rapid and led by emotion,[3] hot cognition may consequently cause biased decision making.
[4] 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.
An example of a biased decision caused by hot cognition would be a juror disregarding evidence because of an attraction to the defendant.
Cold cognition is thought to be associated with executive functions elicited by abstract, deconceptualized tasks, such as card sorting.
It appears as though children take longer to fully develop hot executive functioning than cold.
While the preschool years are ones of extreme sensitivity to the development of prefrontal cortex, a similar period is found in the transition into adolescence.
[11] This gives rise to the idea that there may be a time window for intervention training, which would improve cognitive abilities and executive functioning in children and adolescents.
The cool tasks are neutrally affective and measure executive function abilities such as cognitive flexibility and working memory.
[13] The cool tasks are neutrally affective and measure executive function abilities such as cognitive flexibility and working memory.
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.
[14] In addition, hot cognition changes the way people use decision-making strategies, depending on the type of mood they are in, positive or negative.
In a negative mood people employ non-compensatory, narrow strategies which leads to a more detail-oriented and thorough processing of information.
In the study participants were shown movie clips in order to induce a mood of happiness, anger or sadness and asked to complete a decision-making task.
Researchers found that participants in the negative mood condition used more non-compensatory, specific decision-making techniques by focusing on the details of the situation.
Participants in the positive mood condition used more compensatory, broad decision making techniques by focusing on the bigger picture of the situation.
[13] In another clinical population, those diagnosed with bipolar disorder exaggerated their perception of negative feedback and were less likely to adjust their decision making process in the face of risky-choices (gambling tasks).