Cognitive Scaffold

Preparing your thinking workspace

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MENTAL MODEL · M9666

Chain of Thought

Chain of Thought
TechnicalHigh supportArtificial Intelligence
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Version 1.0.0 · Updated 2026-07-30

CORE DEFINITION

Decomposing complex reasoning into a series of intermediate steps and deriving conclusions step by step—an important prompting technique for large language models. Scaffolding role: making the reasoning process explicit. Instead of directly giving the answer, it shows each step leading to the answer. (Merged: Chain of Thought, Chain of Thought Restructuring)

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

Making the reasoning process explicit. Instead of directly giving the answer, it shows each step leading to the answer. (Merged: Chain of Thought, Chain of Thought Restructuring)

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

Chain-of-Thought (CoT): explicitly generating intermediate reasoning steps before giving the answer, making complex problems decomposable and inspectable. It not only improves large model performance but also serves as a method for humans to externalize reasoning.

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Source support: Explicit

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    en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_thoughtZH · Explicit
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