Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite a general recognition that there are two styles of think-ing: fast, reflexive and relatively effortless (Type 1) versus slow,reflective and effortful (Type 2), dual-process theories of cogni-tion remain controversial, in particular, for their vagueness. Toaddress this lack of formal precision, we take a mathematicalcategory theory approach towards understanding what under-lies the relationship between dual cognitive processes. Fromour category theory perspective, we show that distinguishingfeatures of Type 1 versus Type 2 processes are exhibited viaadjoint and representable functors. These results suggest thatcategory theory provides a useful formal framework for devel-oping dual-process theories of cognition.