REFERENCE
Glossary
Detailed definitions across cognitive warfare, cognitive security, synthetic media and decision integrity. Each term has a crawlable URL.
64 TERMS · ALL ENTRIES
Personalized Cognitive Pressure
An emerging descriptive cybersecurity and cognitive-security term for the use or potential use of AI, behavioral intelligence, synthetic media and adaptive digital interactions to alter the information environment surrounding a specific individual, micro-group or decision process, potentially affecting perception, confidence, judgment or decision-making.
Cognitive Warfare
A concept, advanced notably by NATO, describing attempts to change the cognition and behavior of targeted audiences through information activities, often integrated with conventional and cyber operations.
Cognitive Security
The protection of people, organizations and decision processes against manipulation, deception, synthetic information, impersonation and coordinated influence capable of degrading the integrity of judgment.
Precision Influence
Influence activities tailored to narrow targets — individuals, roles or micro-groups — using data-driven targeting rather than mass broadcasting.
Cognitive Targeting
The direction of information activities at the cognition, perception or decision process of a specific actor or role.
Computational Persuasion
The use of computing systems, data and algorithms to design and deliver persuasive messaging, often adaptively.
Psychological Microtargeting
Tailoring messages to small audience segments using psychological traits inferred from data.
Behavioral Analytics
The measurement and analysis of behavior patterns, often from digital traces, to infer traits or predict actions.
Psychometrics
The field concerned with the measurement of psychological attributes such as personality traits.
OSINT
Open-Source Intelligence — information collected from publicly available sources.
SOCMINT
Social Media Intelligence — intelligence derived from social-media platforms and activity.
Deepfake
Synthetic media — typically image, video or audio — generated or manipulated using machine learning to depict events that did not occur or words that were not said.
Synthetic Media
Media content generated or substantially altered by AI, including text, image, audio and video.
Synthetic Identity
A fabricated online persona, often enhanced with generated media, designed to appear human and credible.
AI Agent
An AI system that pursues goals by taking actions, often using tools, memory and planning.
Agentic AI
AI systems exhibiting autonomous goal-directed behavior across multi-step tasks.
Persistent Memory
A system’s retention of context and history across interactions, enabling continuity and adaptation.
Knowledge Graph
A structured representation of entities and their relationships used for reasoning and retrieval.
Social Graph
A data structure representing social relationships and interactions among actors.
Narrative Analysis
The systematic study of storylines, frames and claims circulating in an information environment.
Narrative Laundering
The process by which a claim is routed through successive sources to obscure its origin and lend it apparent independence.
Content Laundering
Republishing or repackaging content so that its original, often dubious, provenance is hidden.
Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior
Coordinated activity by networks of accounts that misrepresent identity or intent, a term used by platform integrity teams.
Information Environment
The total set of information, sources and channels that surrounds an actor and shapes their perception.
Information Operations
Organized activities to influence, disrupt or affect the information environment of an audience.
Influence Operations
Campaigns designed to affect the perceptions or behavior of target audiences.
Decision Integrity
The property that a consequential decision is made on the basis of authentic, verified and contextually accurate information.
Decision Superiority
An operational advantage gained by making better-informed and faster decisions than an adversary.
Cognitive Resilience
The capacity of individuals and organizations to withstand and recover from information manipulation.
Cognitive SOC
A Security Operations Center extended to monitor and defend the information environment and decision processes, not only networks.
Information Provenance
The documented origin and chain of custody of a piece of information or media.
C2PA
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, which maintains the Content Credentials standard for cryptographically verifiable media provenance.
Content Credentials
Cryptographically signed metadata attached to media that records its origin and edit history.
Authority Simulation
An influence pattern in which a source is made to appear authoritative or official to increase uptake.
Synthetic Corroboration
The illusion of independent confirmation created when one coordinated operation emits the same claim across multiple fabricated channels.
Consensus Fabrication
Manufacturing the appearance of widespread agreement through coordinated accounts or outlets.
Contradictory Flooding
Saturating an information space with conflicting claims to overwhelm verification and induce paralysis.
Context Poisoning
Injecting manipulated context into the information environment an AI system retrieves from, biasing its outputs.
Urgency Compression
An influence pattern that manufactures time pressure to force a decision before verification is possible.
Decision-Point Targeting
Timing influence to coincide with a specific consequential decision window.
Cross-Channel Convergence
Coordinating the same narrative across multiple channels to simulate independent corroboration.
Semantic Clustering
Grouping content by meaning to detect coordinated narrative patterns.
Narrative Synchronization
The simultaneous appearance of similar claims across independent-looking sources, a coordination signal.
Impersonation
Falsely presenting as another person or organization, often using synthetic media.
Voice Cloning
AI-based synthesis of a person’s voice from samples, enabling fabricated speech.
Deepfake Detection
Technical methods for identifying synthetic or manipulated media.
Source Authentication
Verifying that a source is genuinely who it claims to be.
Two-Channel Verification
Confirming critical information through a second, independent and authenticated channel.
Recommendation Poisoning
Manipulating the inputs or environment of an AI recommender to bias its outputs.
RAG Poisoning
Injecting malicious content into the retrieval corpus a retrieval-augmented generation system draws from.
Information Supply Chain
The chain of sources, aggregators and systems through which information reaches a decision-maker.
Human Attack Surface
The set of human cognitive and behavioral attributes that adversarial influence can exploit.
Cognitive Attack Surface
The information environment and decision processes exposed to adversarial influence.
FIMI
Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference — a term used by the EU to describe state-aligned disinformation and interference.
Disinformation
False information spread with intent to deceive or harm.
Misinformation
False information spread without necessarily deceptive intent.
Malinformation
Information that is genuine but used out of context to cause harm.
Prebunking
Inoculating audiences against manipulation by exposing manipulation techniques before exposure.
Debunking
Correcting false claims after they have spread.
Microtargeting
Targeting very small audience segments with tailored messaging using data.
Adaptive Influence
Influence that adjusts based on observed responses to prior interactions.
Closed-Loop Influence
An influence system that observes responses and updates its model and output in a continuous cycle.
Decision Integrity Profile
A defensive mapping of a role’s critical decisions, trusted sources, channels and verification paths — not a psychological profile.
Zero Trust for Information
A cognitive-security principle: never treat apparent information convergence as independent confirmation until provenance and source independence are verified.