Cognitive Framing
A frame is a psychological device that offers a perspective and manipulates salience to influence subsequent judgment. By inviting to view the topic from a certain perspective it not only offers a perspective but manages the observer's alignment in relation to the subject. In a visual field some objects are perceived as prominent while others recede in the background. Directing the viewer to consider certain features and to ignore others, perception is organized around the frame and may be resized to fit within the constraints of the framework. By implying a certain organization for the information it co-creates the picture and influences judgment and information received. Influencing the way a problem is perceived can lead to radically different solutions. According to Prospect Theory, humans give priority to not loosing. Gains are secondary to "no loss". Framing a decision in terms of possible loss should motivate more than framing the same decision in terms of possible gain, a person is more likely to follow conservative strategies when presented with a positively-framed dilemma and choosing risky strategies when presented with negatively-framed ones.
All variants of the Frame Problem in a theory of mind are special cases of the problem of complete description. It not only appears within the situation calculus for representing a constantly changing world, closely related to the general problem of the "laws of motion" which can adequately describe the world, but also in prediction, induction, reasoning, natural language understanding, learning and other problems. It is generally not possible to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for anything and it is even unknown what is meant by "a complete description" of, for example, everything that is relevant for a particular action in a particular situation in view of a particular goal. A prevailing framing effect is in media itself where news programs may even try to follow the rules for objective reporting and yet inadvertently convey a dominant framing of the news that prevents most audience members from making a balanced assessment of a situation.