The Universal & Atomic Elements of Organization
A falsifiable scientific theory proposing that the same irreducible structures organize both thought and reality — from the quantum to the social scale.
O-Theory proposes that four irreducible structures — Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives (DSRP) — form the universal grammar of organization. Rather than being merely useful ways of thinking, these structures are hypothesized to be the atomic elements from which every organized phenomenon emerges, whether in cognition, biology, physics, mathematics, society, or the cosmos.
| D | S | R | P |
| Distinctions | Systems | Relationships | Perspectives |
| Identity ↔ Other | Part ↔ Whole | Action ↔ Reaction | Point ↔ View |
| D := (i ↔ o) | S := (p ↔ w) | R := (a ↔ r) | P := (ṗ ↔ v) |
This is a living scientific evidence compendium: an open, continually evolving collection of independent empirical research, formal theory, mathematical proofs, cross-disciplinary analyses, applications, critiques, and proposed falsifications. Every entry is included because it supports, refines, challenges, or attempts to falsify the theory.
Scientific theories are strengthened not only by evidence that confirms their predictions, but also by surviving attempts to falsify them. This compendium brings both together: independent evidence from researchers who were not testing DSRP and proposed counterexamples evaluated against the formal theory.
One counterexample is enough to falsify O-Theory. Until then, the question remains: do the same four structures organize everything from quantum systems to human thought?
Independent convergence is one of the strongest forms of scientific evidence because researchers arrive at the same conclusion while investigating different questions for different reasons.
The number is not the point. Researchers in different fields, studying different questions with different methods, repeatedly arrived at the same structural predictions—almost always without testing DSRP or using its language.
Try a different term or clear the filters.
This compendium began as the peer-reviewed literature review “A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition,” published in the Journal of Systems Thinking with 109 studies. That paper is the peer-reviewed foundation. What you see here is its living, continuously updated version . New studies are checked before they are added, and the collection now holds and keeps growing. Open any card to see what the researchers found, why it bears on DSRP, and where the original review discusses it, the fuller account.
The collection is updated continuously, so the citation carries the date you consulted it rather than a study count — the count changes weekly, and putting it in the reference would make the same collection look like a different work to everyone who cites it. To cite a single claim or study, use its own address: every one has a permanent link.
This is the adversarial half of the compendium. Where the evidence track asks what converges on DSRP, this one asks what would end it: a single organized phenomenon whose structure needs a fifth pattern, a ninth element, or a fifth structural dynamic. It holds written up from candidates across territories, and resolutions — the general answers those cases settle against. Every case is published whether it held or failed, including the ones still open.
Cite this rather than the evidence collection when the point is what survived attack. The two are separate works with separate addresses: one asks what converges on the theory, the other asks what would end it, and a reference to the first does not support a claim about the second. Case and resolution numbers change when the record is revised, so cite a case by its own permanent link rather than by number.
This collection is meant to keep growing. Send us a study, paper, book or critique that bears on DSRP, whether it supports the theory or cuts against it, and we will read it and decide whether it belongs.
Authors Newman and Jusczyk
Year 1996
Publisher Perception & Psychophysics
Discipline Human Development
Read it at the publisher 10.3758/BF03207548
Do infants experience the "cocktail party effect?"
Infants indicated that they listened longer to the recordings with the familiarized words, demonstrating that they do experience the "cocktail party effect."
Infants are able to make auditory distinctions.
As Quinn et al shows, young infants visually distinguish among objects with some skill. Studies on aural distinctions made by infants also explore another sensory mode of distinguishing sounds. Newman and Jusczyk (1996) studied the brain’s ability to separate one sound (i.e., your name at a cocktail party) from many competing background sounds (known as the “cocktail party effect.” This phenomena has been studied in adults, but their studies showed that infants as young as 7.5 months old separate particular sounds from competing sounds. Their first three experiments were designed to test if infants at or around the age of 7.5 months were able to attend to a target voice that was either 10 dB, 5 dB, or 0 dB more intense than a competing background voice. The researchers hypothesized that if infants were able to separate competing layers of speech, they would listen longer to “fluent speech passages” that contain words they heard in the familiarization trial.
For the first experiment, 24 infants at ~7.5 months of age were tested. They went through a familiarization trial, where they were familiarized with their target words. They were then tested with four, 6-sentence passages (known in text as “Cup”, “Dog”, “Feet”, and “Bike”) that were read and recorded by a woman speaking in a “lively” tone. The familiarized target words were dispersed throughout the passages, and were not necessarily emphasized in the passage. For the distractor recording, a non-lively male voice was used, and when the two recordings were played, the distractor passage was set at 10 dB lower than the target recording. Half of the infants were assigned to the “Cup and Dog” familiarization trials, while the other half were assigned to the “Feet and Bike” familiarization trials. The two recordings were played while the infant was looking at a blinking red light, and the recording stopped when the infant looked away for two consecutive seconds (to indicate that they were no longer listening). The results showed that 21 out of 24 infants listened longer to the passages containing familiar words. The infants listened to the familiar passages for an average of 7.71 seconds, and the unfamiliar ones for an average of 6.21 seconds. “These results suggest that infants are capable of separating different streams of speech and are capable of listening selectively.”
For the second experiment the only change in the method was that the distractor passage was reduced to 5 dB lower than the target passage. All other experimental conditions were the same, including the sample of 24 infants aged ~7.5 months. In this second experiment 18 of 24 infants listened longer to the passages
Patterns it shows D
How to cite this Newman and Jusczyk (1996). The Cocktail Party Effect in Infants. Perception & Psychophysics.