What it actually is
It measures how a mind remembers.
This is the machine room. Cognivia reads the timing and confidence behind every answer, tells plain forgetting apart from a misconception or a missing prerequisite, and hands back a memory state you can act on, all running quietly on any shared classroom computer while a learner just answers questions. Below, every moving part, opened up.
In sixty seconds
Here is the whole idea in one breath. Cognivia watches how you answer, works out how quickly each idea is slipping for you in particular, does something about it before it goes, and then checks whether that something actually worked. Measure, act, measure again. Everything below is that loop, taken apart piece by piece.
Inside every session
Every feature on this page maps to one mechanism in the science, and nothing here is decoration.
Four-option recall with diagnostic distractors
Review timed to your own decay estimate
Confidence rated on every answer
Every attempt logged automatically
One full loop, every session
Several things happen inside every Cognivia session, all running automatically in the background. Each one is grounded in research on how memory works. Together they form a complete loop: the system reads how each learner is doing, tells a wrong understanding apart from an incomplete one, decides what to do about each kind of failure, and records every step so its own recommendations can be checked against what actually happened. It runs in the browser on a single low-cost computer.
A named, validated error taxonomy
Live, as you answer, it separates plain forgetting, a half-formed grasp, a missing prerequisite, and a confident misconception. The taxonomy is explicitly defined rather than impressionistic, so two independent raters can classify the same error the same way. This is the instrument's core.
Scheduling is an output, not the point
One thing the diagnosis lets you do: time each review against the student's own error-type-specific decay curve, a separate forgetting estimate for a fading memory versus a shaky grasp, not one fixed calendar. Every spaced-repetition tool since 2005 schedules against a single curve; splitting it by error type is the part that is ours.
Auto-Generating Research Instrument
Every response, timing, and session is logged automatically as one row in a public, pre-registered research dataset.
The Learning Genome
Ten variables that describe how you remember.
They describe how YOU specifically remember, not whether you got marks. You don't need a single symbol to use Cognivia, they're the system's shorthand for noticing how you learn, how fast you forget, when you get tired, and which kinds of mistakes you repeat, so it can bring each thing back right before you'd forget it. The letters are for the researchers; the studying is for you.
Seven of these read from a single session. The last three, spacing benefit, automatic recall, and bounce-back after a miss, need several sessions before they mean anything, so they fill in over time rather than on day one.
One session is a snapshot. Thirty sessions are a portrait. By session 30, each topic in your subject has its own λ, its own RS curve, its own consolidation efficiency. The engine knows that you forget chemistry differently from biology, that fatigue hits you on the seventh question rather than the tenth, that your confabulation rate spikes on a specific kind of question.
How to read the math
These formulas and their cutoffs are Cognivia's own design choices, not results borrowed from the papers cited across this site. The decay form draws on Ebbinghaus and on Wixted & Carpenter (2007); the storage-versus-retrieval distinction on Bjork & Bjork (1992); the confidence and error-type signals on the metacognition literature. But the exact expressions, the smoothing coefficients (α = 0.75, α = 0.30), and every threshold (λ ≤ 0.7, CE > 0.85, FSI > 0.20, PDS > 0.6) are engineering defaults we chose, seeded from the n = 5 pilot and the literature. They are how the system computes today, not validated constants. Calibrating these thresholds against a real student population is one of the things the trial is for.
The Cognitive Passport
"How does your mind actually work?"
A percentage says what a student got right on a given day, and a percentile says where they ranked that day. Neither reaches how memory forms, how knowledge consolidates, or how someone thinks when no one is watching. The Cognitive Passport is a first attempt at answering those questions with evidence gathered continuously as a student works, where a transcript is a single impression at term's end. It won't replace every form of assessment, but it may be a start at treating learning as the individual, biological process it is.
In practice it is a page per learner: a forgetting rate for each topic, the mistakes that keep coming back, the point in a session where fatigue sets in. A university or a scholarship committee could read that and see what a transcript hides.