What is cognition and how does it work?

Cognition encompasses the mental processes that deal with knowledge, including perception, attention, memory, thinking, and language. It involves psychological activities that acquire, store, retrieve, transform, or apply information to help individuals interact with the world. Various disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science study these processes across humans, animals, and artificial systems.

What we know

• Cognitive processes include perception, attention, memory, thinking, language, and metacognition. [4]
• The definition of cognition varies by discipline, with psychologists often focusing on human behaviors and ethologists having widely varying definitions for animals. [2]
• Embodied cognition theories investigate how mental processes are shaped by an organism's bodily state, motor system, and perceptual system. [3]
• Different theoretical models of cognition include classical computationalism, connectionism, representationalism, and anti-representationalism. [4]

Still open

• Ethological definitions of cognition range from considering only behaviors also exhibited in humans to considering any action involving a nervous system as cognitive.

Where to go next

• what caused itHow did animal intelligence evolve?
• how it workedHow does embodied cognition shape the mind?
• a case in pointWhat are the mental capacities of non-human animals?
• the bigger pictureHow do neuroscience and psychology study the mind?
• compared withHow do connectionism and computationalism compare?
• an unexpected connectionCan plants exhibit cognitive functions?Modern embodied cognition research draws on understandings from plant cognition alongside animal cognition and artificial intelligence.

Sources

• [1]Evolution of cognition (Wikidata Q55611245) · CC0 1.0
• [2]Evolution of cognition · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [3]Embodied cognition · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [4]Cognition · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [5]Animal cognition · CC BY-SA 4.0