> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://primer.ought.org/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://primer.ought.org/intro/factored-cognition.md).

# Factored Cognition

## What is factored cognition?

[Factored cognition](https://ought.org/research/factored-cognition) refers to the idea of breaking down (or factoring) sophisticated learning and reasoning tasks into many small and mostly independent tasks.

We’ll call programs that describe how to break down a task *recipes*.

## Why factored cognition?

We can think about machine learning systems on [a spectrum from process-based to outcome-based](https://ought.org/updates/2022-04-06-process):

* Process-based systems are built on human-understandable task decompositions, with direct supervision of reasoning steps.
* Outcome-based systems are built on end-to-end optimization, with supervision of final results.

Factored cognition is a prerequisite for making the reasoning processes of large language models explicit so that they can be supervised more easily.