One instrument, every learner
Cognivia is not a classroom tool. It is an instrument for how memory works, made for anyone who needs to learn something and hold onto it. If you are thirteen or older, it was built for you. It runs on any shared classroom computer, nothing to install, nothing to configure.
The 60-second version
Most study tools tell you what you got wrong. Cognivia pays attention to something harder: why you got it wrong, and when you're about to forget it. As you answer, it tells apart plain forgetting, half-knowing, and being confidently wrong, and it works out how fast each idea fades for you in particular. Then it brings each thing back right before you'd lose it, instead of on a fixed schedule that ignores how your memory actually works. Everything below is how that gets measured, in detail. You never need any of it to use the app.
Inside every session
The complete loop
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 learns how each student remembers, schedules each review at the right moment, detects when a student's understanding is wrong rather than just incomplete, and records everything for research. It runs in the browser on a single low-cost computer, and a full session takes under twenty minutes.
Each review is scheduled against the student's own forgetting model, not a fixed calendar.
It separates plain forgetting, a half-formed grasp, and a confident misconception, live, as you answer.
Every response, timing, and session is logged automatically as one row in a public research dataset.
The Learning Genome
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.
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.
These seven formulas and their cutoffs are Cognivia's own operationalisations, 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
Percentages tell you what was right on a given day. Percentiles tell you where you ranked against others on that same day. Neither tells you anything about how memory forms, how knowledge consolidates, or how a student 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, not 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.