Reference

Glossary.

Every academic term used on this site, in plain English. Hover any dotted-underlined term anywhere on the site to see its short definition; click through for the longer one here.

Parent categories

Attentional Metacognitions: Stepping outside the play to monitor or evaluate your own thinking: recall, reflection, doubt, post-hoc appraisal of how you're thinking.; The 'thinking about thinking' parent. Includes experience recall (drawing on stored knowledge), reflective monitoring ('how am I thinking right now?'), metacognitive appraisal ('is that mode working for me?'), dwelling on past plays, savouring, communication-about-communication, and the affective-state codes (uncertainty, confidence, emotions).
Attentional Control · Internal: Attention turned inward to your own actions, mechanics, or state: feedback on what you just did, plans for the next click, technique under conscious control.; The internal half of attentional control. Codes here capture micro-level reflection on your own execution: technical and tactical feedback after an action, pre-fight routines, technical instructions to yourself, and task-irrelevant thoughts. Internal because the cognitive object is yourself.
Attentional Control · External: Attention on the world outside you: fight planning, communication, reading the opponent, lining up the next play.; The external half of attentional control. Codes here capture deliberate, voluntary attention to teammates, opponents, abilities, and tactical reads: fight planning, tactical planning, anticipatory positioning, collaborative planning, threat anticipation, and inferences about enemy mental state. External because the cognitive object is the world.
Game Situation: Background awareness of the game state: positions, abilities, economy, who's still alive, who controls which area.; The cohort's continuous read of what's happening on the screen and the map. Includes enemy position awareness, ability tracking, teammate awareness, hazard awareness, score awareness, and economy awareness. Distinct from attentional control because GS is observational rather than action-directed: it tracks what's there, not what to do about it.

Method and statistics

Think Aloud Protocol: Method where a participant verbalises every thought as it crosses their mind while performing a task. Recordings are then segmented and coded.; Originally formalised by Ericsson & Simon (1980/1993). The participant doesn't analyse or explain; they just narrate. The transcript is then sliced into segments and each segment is tagged with the cognitive content (codes) it carries. Used here against a temporal model of the Valorant round.
segment: One chunk of think-aloud transcript, typically a sentence or short utterance. The unit of coding.
temporal cell: One of the seven phases of a Valorant round, defined by round-phase × combat-phase: buy / move / approach / engage / aftermath / round-end-combat / round-end-calm.
parent category: One of the four superordinate cognitive categories (AM / AC int / AC ext / GS) that every code rolls up into.
scenario: A round-level filter (cohort / won / lost / high-perf-won / low-perf-lost / eco). Same temporal axis as the cohort view, but only rounds that match the filter are aggregated.; Six round-level filters that slice the data without changing the seven-cell axis. 'Cohort' is all live-play rounds. 'Won' / 'lost' filter by round outcome. 'HP won' = won rounds with ≥2 player kills (high performance). 'LP lost' = lost rounds with ≤1 kill (low performance). 'Eco' = rounds where the modal economy was eco (saved money).
z-score: Standard-deviation distance from the cohort's mean. +1.0σ means one standard deviation hotter than the cohort average; +2.0σ means two.; On a typology card, +1.7σ on `tactical planning` means this player verbalises tactical-planning content roughly 1.7 standard deviations more often per round than the eight-player cohort average. Larger absolute values flag more distinctive use of that code; values close to 0 mean the player tracks the cohort.
density: Codes per segment: how thickly a player's transcript is tagged. Higher = more cognitive content per spoken segment.; A segment is one chunk of think-aloud transcript. Density divides total code applications by total segments, giving an average load. The cohort runs around 1.5 codes per segment; a density of 1.8 means that player's segments are denser than average.