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[Middle English cognicioun, from Latin cognitiō, cognitiōn-, from cognitus, past participle of cognōscere, to learn : co-, intensive pref.; see co– + gnōscere, to know.]
cognitional cog·ni'tion·al adj.The internal structures and processes that are involved in the acquisition and use of knowledge, including sensation, perception, attention, learning, memory, language, thinking, and reasoning. Cognitive scientists propose and test theories about the functional components of cognition based on observations of an organism's external behavior in specific situations.
Cognition throughout life can be broadly described as an interaction between knowledge-driven processes and sensory processes; and between controlled processes and automatic processes. Over time, there is a trade-off between the amount of surface information that is retained in the internal representation of objects or events (bottom-up processing) and the amount of meaning that is incorporated (top-down processing). Following exposure to a stimulus, a sensory representation (sometimes called an image, icon, or echo) is constructed that encodes nearly all the surface characteristics of the stimulus (for example, color, shape, location, pitch, and loudness). The information is short lived, lasting less than a second. Much evidence suggests that extraction of information from this representation takes place in two stages, a feature analysis stage and an object recognition stage. It is during the latter stage that attention (controlled processing) and previous knowledge come into play. See also Memory; Perception.
Conceptual knowledge is needed to classify objects and events in the world. Some aspects of conceptual knowledge are innate or emerge very early in development, while others are acquired through learning and inference.
A primary cognitive function of all social species is communication, which can be accomplished by a combination of vocal, gestural, and even hormonal signals. Of all species on Earth, only humans have developed a communication system based on abstract signs. This evolutionary development is closely tied to the greater reasoning capacity of humans as well. All reasoning can be broadly described as pattern recognition and search. Conceptual knowledge base are searched for relevant information in order to draw a conclusion, solve a problem, or guide behavior. Thinking often takes the form of a chain of associations among concepts in long-term memory, with one thought retrieving others to which it is related. The most common reasoning strategies include direct retrieval, imaging, means-ends analysis, analogy, classification, deduction, and formal procedures.
Reasoning by direct retrieval involves retrieving a known fact from memory to solve a problem. Reasoning imagistically involves constructing or retrieving images from conceptual memory and examining or manipulating them to solve a problem. For example, individuals reason imagistically when they determine how many windows there are in their living rooms by retrieving an image of the room and counting the windows in the image.
Means-ends analysis is typically employed when solving problems in unfamiliar domains. When a solution is not immediately apparent, reasoners typically compare the goal to the current situation and select means with which to reduce the differences between the two situations.
The restructuring of a problem representation that allows an available means to be used in a novel way or a seemingly unrelated bit of knowledge to be accessed to solve the probem is called insight.
Reasoning by analogy is used when a current situation allows an individual to recall another, similar situation that has a known solution or other information relevant to the task at hand. It is a technique that is powerful but error prone.
Reasoning by classification involves making inferences about an object or event based on its category membership.
Deductive reasoning involves drawing a conclusion based on its logical relation to one or more premises. A second common use for deduction is testing hypotheses.
Formal procedures for reasoning and for solving problems include logic, mathematics, probability theory and statistics, and scientific investigation. Understanding of the behavior and properties of physical, biological, and cognitive systems has been greatly enhanced through the use of these techniques. See also Psycholinguistics.
By using noninvasive techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET scan), magnetic resonance imaging, electrical skin conductance, invasive surgical and chemical investigations of animal brains, and data from clinically observed syndromes associated with brain injury, cognitive neuroscientists have pieced together information concerning the role that specific brain regions play in the processing of emotional and cognitive events. High-level visual processing, such as object recognition, takes place in the occipital lobes of the cortex, although recognition of certain highly complex visual stimuli, such as faces, is handled by the right cerebral hemisphere. Auditory stimuli in general are processed by the temporal lobes of the cortex, and written and spoken word recognition and syntactical components of language processing are handled by certain regions of the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex, notably Broca's and Wernicke's areas; while emotional, idiomatic, and prosodic aspects of language are handled by corresponding regions in the right hemisphere. Higher cognition, such as reasoning and problem solving, involves the frontal lobes of the cortex. Memory and the processing of emotional stimuli are handled by the combined effort of the cortex (notably the anterior and frontal regions) and subcortical structures (notably the limbic system).
One particular subcortical structure—the hippocampus—plays a major role in the formation of new explicit memories. It is believed that an intact hippocampus is needed to temporarily bind together distributed sites of activation in the cortex that together make up a whole, explicit memory for an event. See also Brain; Computerized tomography.
Theories of cognition are often tested by building computer models that embody the theories and then comparing the model's performance with human performance on selected tasks. These models tend to be of two types. Rule-based models consist of a long-term memory containing rules which specify actions to take in the presence of particular input patterns, a short-term memory that encodes input patterns and temporarily stores data structures constructed by the rules, and a control structure that guides the process and resolves conflicts when more than one rule applies to the current input. Neural network models simulate cognition as a strengthening and weakening of associations among cognitive events. They consist of a network of interconnected nodes, a mathematical formula for modifying the connections, and a mathematical formula for propagating activation through the network. See also Expert systems; Intelligence.
The higher mental processes, including understanding, reasoning, knowledge, and intellectual capacity.
Those processes involved in the gathering, organization, and use of knowledge. Cognition is, simply, thinking, and is often compared with feeling, known as affect, and trying, known as volition. Much of behavioural geography is concerned with cognition; the way in which people perceive and respond to outside stimuli.
For more information on cognition, visit Britannica.com.
Cognitive processes are those responsible for knowledge and awareness. They include the processing of experience, perception, and memory, as well as overtly verbal thinking.
Human thought processes involving perception, reasoning, and remembering.
Mental processes by which knowledge about oneself, others, and the environment is gained and interpreted. It includes thought processes such as perception, problem solving, and creativity.
Cognition is a diffuse[dubious ] term, used
in different ways by different disciplines. In psychology, it refers to an information
processing view of an individual's psychological functions. Other
interpretations of the meaning of cognition link it to the development of concepts; individual minds, groups,
organizations, and even larger coalitions of entities, can be modelled as
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The term cognition (Latin: cognoscere, "to know") is used in several loosely related ways to refer to a faculty for the human-like processing of information, applying knowledge and changing preferences. Cognition or cognitive processes can be natural and artificial, conscious and not conscious; therefore, they are analyzed from different perspectives and in different contexts, in anesthesia, neurology, psychology, philosophy, systemics and computer science. The concept of cognition is closely related to such abstract concepts as mind, reasoning, perception, intelligence, learning, and many others that describe numerous capabilities of the human mind and expected properties of artificial or synthetic intelligence. Cognition is an abstract property of advanced living organisms; therefore, it is studied as a direct property of a brain or of an abstract mind on subsymbolic and symbolic levels.[original research?]
In psychology and in artificial intelligence, it is used to refer to the mental functions, mental processes and states of intelligent entities (humans, human organizations, highly autonomous robots), with a particular focus toward the study of such mental processes as comprehension, inferencing, decision-making, planning and learning (see also cognitive science and cognitivism). Recently, advanced cognitive researchers have been especially focused on the capacities of abstraction, generalization, concretization/specialization and meta-reasoning which descriptions involve such concepts as beliefs, knowledge, desires, preferences and intentions of intelligent individuals/objects/agents/systems.
The term "cognition" is also used in a wider sense to mean the act of knowing or knowledge, and may be interpreted in a social or cultural sense to describe the emergent development of knowledge and concepts within a group that culminates in both thought and action.
The sort of mental processes described as cognitive or cognitive processes are largely influenced by research which has successfully used this paradigm in the past. Consequently, this description tends to apply to processes such as memory, attention, perception, action, problem solving and mental imagery. Traditionally, emotion was not thought of as a cognitive process. This division is now regarded as largely artificial, and much research is currently being undertaken to examine the cognitive psychology of emotion; research also includes one's awareness of strategies and methods of cognition, known as metacognition.
Empirical research into cognition is usually scientific and quantitative, or involves creating models to describe or explain certain behaviors.
While few people would deny that cognitive processes are a function of the brain, a cognitive theory will not necessarily make any reference to the brain or any other biological process (compare neurocognitive). It may purely describe behaviour in terms of information flow or function. Relatively recent fields of study such as cognitive science and neuropsychology aim to bridge this gap, using cognitive paradigms to understand how the brain implements these information-processing functions (see also cognitive neuroscience), or how pure information-processing systems (e.g., computers) can simulate cognition (see also artificial intelligence). The branch of psychology that studies brain injury to infer normal cognitive function is called cognitive neuropsychology. The links of cognition to evolutionary demands are studied through the investigation of animal cognition. And conversely, evolutionary-based perspectives can inform hypotheses about cognitive functional systems evolutionary psychology.
The theoretical school of thought derived from the cognitive approach is often called cognitivism.
The phenomenal success of the cognitive approach can be seen by its current dominance as the core model in contemporary psychology (usurping behaviorism in the late 1950s).
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This success has led to its application within a wide range of areas:
In its widest sense, the field is quite eclectic and draws from a number of areas, such as:
On an individual being level, these questions are studied by the separate fields above, but are also more integrated into
cognitive ontology of various kinds. This challenges the older linguistically dependent views of ontology, wherein one could debate
being, perceiving, and doing, with no cognizance of innate human limits, varying human lifeways, and loyalties that may let a
being "know" something (see qualia) that for others remains very much in doubt.
On the level of an individual mind, an emergent behavior might be the formation of a new concept, 'bubbling up' from below the conscious level of the mind. A simple way of stating this is that beings preserve their own attention and are at every level concerned with avoiding interruption and distraction. Such cognitive specialization can be observed in particular in language, with adults markedly less able to hear or say distinctions made in languages to which they were not exposed in youth.
By the 1980s, researchers in the Engineering departments of the University of Leeds, UK hypothesized that 'Cognition is a form of compression', i.e., cognition was an economic, not just a philosophical or a psychological, process; in other words, skill in the process of cognition confers a competitive advantage. An implication of this view is that choices about what to cognize are being made at all levels from the neurological expression up to species-wide priority setting; in other words, the compression process is a form of optimization. This is a force for self-organizing behavior; thus we have the opportunity to see samples of emergent behavior at each successive level, from individual, to groups of individuals, to formal organizations, to KJ.
It has been observed since antiquity that language acquisition in human children
fails to emerge unless the children are exposed to language. Thus, language acquisition is an example of an emergent behavior, which in fact requires a narrow, yet evolutionarily reliably occurring, set of inputs. In
this case, the individual is made up of a set of mechanisms 'expecting' such input from the social world.
In education, for instance, which has the explicit task in society of developing child cognition, choices are made regarding the environment and permitted action that lead to a formed experience. In social cognition, face perception in human babies emerges by the age of two months. This is in turn affected by the risk or cost of providing these, for instance, those associated with a playground or swimming pool or field trip. On the other hand, the macro-choices made by the teachers are extremely influential on the micro-choices made by children.
In a large systemic perspective, cognition is considered closely related to the social and human organizationfunctioning and constrains. Managerial decision making processes can be erroneous in politics, economy and industry for the reason of different reciprocally dependent socio-cognitive factors. This domain became the field of interest of emergent socio-cognitive engineering (Google search).
One famous image, Earthrise, taken during Apollo 8, the first Apollo mission to the Moon, shows planet Earth in a single photograph. Earthrise is now the icon for Earth Day, which did not arise until after the image became widespread. At this level, an example of an 'emergent behavior' might be concern for Spaceship Earth, as encouraged by the development of orbiting space observatories etc.
Other concepts which seem to have arisen only recently (in the last century) include increased expectations for human rights. In this case, an example of an 'emergent behavior' might perhaps be the use of the mass media to publicize inequities in the human condition, perhaps using highly portable cameras and telephones.
It is possible to find other examples of critical mass necessary to develop a concept. For example, a nascent coalition of individuals might fail in the implementation of some agreement among them; but in the words of Ward
Cunningham, the inventor of the Wiki-wiki Web:
In other words, when the organization adapted, the concept adapted and survived the incipient failure mode.
The Santiago theory of cognition by Varela and Maturana present an interesting version of
cognition which equates the very act of being alive with a cognitive act. This of course leads us to theories of consciousness, awareness and other cognitve-related topics.
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Wikipedia portals
Lycan, W.G., (ed.). (1999). Mind and Cognition: An Anthology, 2nd Edition. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Dansk (Danish)
n. - erkendelse, viden, kognition
Nederlands (Dutch)
het kennen, waarneming/idee, cognitie
Français (French)
n. - (Philos, Psych) connaissance, cognition
Deutsch (German)
n. - Erkenntnis, Wahrnehmung
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - γνώση, γνωστική λειτουργία
Português (Portuguese)
n. - cognição (f)
Español (Spanish)
n. - cognición
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - kognition, förstånd, förnimmelse
中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
认识, 知觉, 认识力
中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 認識, 知覺, 認識力
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 認識, 認知, 認識力
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) ادراك, درايه, معرفه
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ידיעה, הכרה, תוצר הידיעה, ההבחנה או ההבנה: תפיסה, תחושה, רעיון או אינטואיציה
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