Social engineering cyberattacks are a major threat because they often prelude sophisticated and devastating cyberattacks. Social engineering cyberattacks are a kind of psychological attack that exploits weaknesses in human cognitive functions. Adequate defense against social engineering cyberattacks requires a deeper understanding of what aspects of human cognition are exploited by these cyberattacks, why humans are susceptible to these cyberattacks, and how we can minimize or at least mitigate their damage. These questions have received some amount of attention, but the state-of-the-art (...) understanding is superficial and scattered in the literature. In this paper, we review human cognition through the lens of social engineering cyberattacks. Then, we propose an extended framework of human cognitive functions to accommodate social engineering cyberattacks. We cast existing studies on various aspects of social engineering cyberattacks into the extended framework, while drawing a number of insights that represent the current understanding and shed light on future research directions. The extended framework might inspire future research endeavor toward a new sub-field that can be called Cybersecurity Cognitive Psychology, which tailors or adapts principles of Cognitive Psychology to the cybersecurity domain while embracing new notions and concepts that are unique to the cybersecurity domain. (shrink)

Although taste and smell seem hard to imagine, some people nevertheless report vivid imagery in these sensory modalities. We investigate whether experts are better able to imagine smells and tastes because they have learned the ability, or whether they are better imaginers in the first place, and so become experts. To test this, we first compared a group of wine experts to yoked novices using a battery of questionnaires. We show for the first time that experts report greater vividness of (...) wine imagery, with no difference in vividness across sensory modalities. In contrast, novices had more vivid color imagery than taste or odor imagery for wines. Experts and novices did not differ on other vividness of imagery measures, suggesting a domain‐specific effect of expertise. Critically, in a second study, we followed a group of students commencing a wine course and a group of matched control participants. Students and controls did not differ before the course, but after the wine course students reported more vivid wine imagery. We provide evidence that expertise improves imagery, exemplifying the extent of plasticity of cognition underlying the chemical senses. (shrink)