INTRODUCTION

Thus far, I have mainly focused on the cognitive limitations aff ecting human thinking generally, and judicial reasoning and decision-making in particular. I have explored how, in light of time and information constraints, people oft en rely on a number of heuristics that allow for decisions to be made with minimal cognitive eff ort, which may lead to suboptimal decisions. I have also examined how implicit attitudes and stereotypes relating to certain social categories aff ect how we perceive and interact with others. Most importantly, I have shown how both of these phenomena consist in extralegal factors that influence judges ‘ decisions, and therefore threaten the fair administration of justice. In the previous chapter, I have presented the debiasing strategies commonly proposed for addressing cognitive and social biases, and evaluated their application in legal settings. These strategies aim at mitigating judgment errors owed to biases and other constraints such as stress and fatigue. Their goal is to address the negative eff ects of biases by improving either the decision-making process or some relevant characteristics of the decision-maker (Zenker 2021). To the point that debiasing strategies improve the decision-maker ‘ s overall cognitive performance, they can be seen as a means of enhancing cognition.

Broadly speaking, cognitive enhancement encompasses interventions that improve cognitive functioning and performance, targeting domains like attention, reasoning, learning and memory, with the goal of restoring function toward the norm or to improve function beyond it.