Analyzing the history of Cognition using Topic Models

•We explore how Cognition changed over the last four decades using Topic Models.•Moral cognition, eyetracking, and action, rose in popularity.•Sentence processing decreased in popularity, while developmental is stable.•We introduce framing topics: topic that frame rather than present content.•Cognition turned from abstract theorizing to more experimental approaches over time.

Very few articles have analyzed how cognitive science as a field has changed over the last six decades. We explore how Cognition changed over the last four decades using Topic Models. Topic Models assume that every word in every document is generated by one of a limited number of topics. Words that are likely to co-occur are likely to be generated by a single topic. We find a number of significant historical trends: the rise of moral cognition, eyetracking methods, and action, the fall of sentence processing, and the stability of development. We introduce the notion of framing topics, which frame content, rather than present the content itself. These framing topics suggest that over time Cognition turned from abstract theorizing to more experimental approaches.