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In science, cognition: refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, memory, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, science and computer science. Usage of the term varies in different disciplines; for example in psychology and cognitive science, it usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. It is also used in a branch of social psychology called social cognition to explain attitudes, attribution and groups dynamics.

The term cognition comes from the Latin verb congnosco (con 'with' + gnōscō 'know'), itself a loanword from the Ancient Greek verb gnόsko "γνώσκω" meaning 'learning' (noun: gnόsis "γνώσις" = knowledge), so broadly, 'to conceptualize' or 'to recognize'.

It refers to a faculty for the processing of information, applying knowledge, and changing preferences. Cognition, or cognitive processes, can be natural or artificial, conscious or unconscious. These processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in the fields of linguistics, anesthesia, neurology and psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, systemics, computer science and creed. Within psychology or philosophy, the concept of cognition is closely related to abstract concepts such as mind, intelligence, cognition is used to refer to the mental functions, mental processes (thoughts) and states of intelligent entities (humans, collaborative groups, human organizations, highly autonomous machines and artificial intelligences).

Piaget's theory of cognitive development[link]

For years, sociologists and psychologists have conducted studies on cognitive development or the construction of human thought or mental processes.

Jean Piaget was one of the more important and influential people in the field of Developmental Psychology. He believed that humans are unique in comparison to animals because we have the ability to do "abstract symbolic reasoning." His work can be compared to Lev Vygotsky, Sigmund Freud, and Erik Erikson who were also great contributors in the field of Developmental Psychology.

Piaget's theory of Developmental Psychology tackled cognitive development from infancy to adulthood.

Psychology[link]

When the mind makes a generalization such as the concept of tree, it extracts similarities from numerous examples; the simplification enables higher-level thinking.

The sort of mental processes described as cognitive are largely influenced by research which has successfully used this paradigm in the past, likely starting with Thomas Aquinas, who divided the study of behavior into two broad categories: cognitive (how we know the world), and affective (how we understand the world via feelings and emotions). Consequently, this description tends to apply to processes such as memory, association, concept formation, pattern recognition, language, attention, perception, action, problem solving and mental imagery.^[1][2] 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 one's own strategies and methods of cognition called metacognition and includes metamemory.

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 reference to the brain or other biological process (compare neurocognitive). It may purely describe behavior 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 branchb 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). Cognition is severely damaged in dementia.

Social process[link]

For every individual, the social context in which he's embedded provides the symbols of his representation and linguistic expression. The human society sets the environment where the newborn will be socialized and develop his cognition. For example, face perception in human babies emerges by the age of two months: young children at a playground or swimming pool develop their social recognition by being exposed to multiple faces and associating the experiences to those faces. Education has the explicit task in society of developing cognition. Choices are made regarding the environment and permitted action that lead to a formed experience.

Language acquisition is an example of an emergent behavior. From a large systemic perspective, cognition is considered closely related to the social and human organization functioning and constrains. For example, the macro-choices made by the teachers influence the micro-choices made by students.

See also[link]

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Cognitive psychology

Wikiversity has learning materials about Cognition

Wikipedia portals

• Portal:philosophy
• Portal:thinking

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Coren, Stanley; Lawrence M. Ward, James T. Enns (1999). Sensation and Perception. Harcourt Brace. p. 9. ISBN 0-470-00226-3. 
• Lycan, W.G., (ed.). (1999). Mind and Cognition: An Anthology, 2nd Edition. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.
• Stanovich, Keith (2009). What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12385-2. Lay summary (21 November 2010). 

External links[link]

Look up cognition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Cognition An international journal publishing theoretical and experimental papers on the study of the mind.
• Information on music cognition, University of Amsterdam
• Cognitie.NL Information on cognition research, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and University of Amsterdam (UvA)
• Emotional and Decision Making Lab, Carnegie Mellon, EDM Lab
• Cognition in the CALT encyclopedia
• The Limits of Human Cognition - an article describing the evolution of mammals' cognitive abilities
• Half-heard phone conversations reduce cognitive performance
• The limits of intelligence Douglas Fox, Scientific American, 14 June 14 2011.

Dan Sperber (born June 20, 1942, Cagnes-sur-Mer) is a French social and cognitive scientist. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics: developing, with British psychologist Deirdre Wilson, relevance theory in the latter; and an approach to cultural evolution known as the 'epidemiology of representations' in the former. Sperber currently holds the positions of Directeur de Recherche émérite at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute.

Background[link]

Sperber is the son of Austrian-French novelist Manès Sperber. He was born in France and raised an atheist but his parents, both non-religious Ashkenazi Jews, imparted on the young Sperber a "respect for my Rabbinic ancestors and for religious thinkers of any persuasion more generally".^[1] He became interested in anthropology as a means of explaining how rational people come to hold mistaken religious beliefs about the supernatural.^[2]

Career[link]

Sperber was trained in anthropology at the Sorbonne and the University of Oxford. In 1965 he joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as a researcher, initially in the Laboratoire d'Études Africaines (French: African studies laboratory). Later he moved to the Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative (Ethnology and Comparative Sociology), the Centre de Recherche en Epistémelogie Appliquée and finally, from 2001, the Institut Jean Nicod.^[3] Sperber's early work was on the anthropology of religion,^[2] and he conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Dorze people of Ethiopia.^[4]

Sperber was an early proponent of structural anthropology, having been introduced to it by Rodney Needham at Oxford, and helped popularise it in British social anthropology.^[5] At the CNRS he studied under Claude Lévi-Strauss, credited as the founder of structuralism, who encouraged Sperber's "untypical theoretical musings".^[6] In the 1970s, however, Sperber came to be identified with post-structuralism in French anthropology,^[7][8] and criticised the theories of Lévi-Strauss and other structuralists for using interpretive ethnographic data as if it were an objective record,^[9] and for its lack of explanatory power.^[10] Nevertheless Sperber has persistently defended the legacy of Lévi-Strauss' work as opening the door for naturalistic social science, and as an important precursor to cognitive anthropology.^[6][11]

After moving away from structuralism, Sperber sought an alternative naturalistic approach to the study of culture. His 1975 book Rethinking Symbolism,^[4] outlined a theory of symbolism using concepts from the burgeoning field of cognitive psychology. It was formulated as a reply to semiological theories which were becoming widespread in anthropology through the works of Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz (which formed the basis of what come to be known as symbolic anthropology).^[12][13] Sperber's later work has continued to argue for the importance of cognitive processes understood through psychology in understanding cultural phenomena and, in particular, cultural transmission. His 'epidemiology of representations'^[9][10][14] is an approach to cultural evolution inspired by the field of epidemiology. It proposes that the distribution of cultural representations (ideas about the world held by multiple individuals) within a population should be explained with reference to biases in transmission (illuminated by cognitive and evolutionary psychology) and the "ecology" of the individual minds they inhabit. Sperber's approach is broadly Darwinist—it explains the macro-distribution of a trait in a population in terms of the cumulative effect micro-processes acting over time—but departs from memetics because he does not see representations as replicators except for in a few special circumstances (such as chain letters).^[15] The cognitive and epidemiological approach to cultural evolution has been influential,^[16] but as a means of explaining culture more generally it is pursued by only a small minority of scholars.^[17]

His most influential work is arguably in linguistics and philosophy: with the British linguist and philosopher Deirdre Wilson he has developed an innovative approach to linguistic interpretation known as relevance theory which as of 2010^[update] has become mainstream in the area of pragmatics, linguistics, artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. He argues that cognitive processes are geared toward the maximisation of relevance, that is, a search for an optimal balance between cognitive efforts and cognitive effects.

As well as his emeritus position at the CNRS, Sperber is currently the Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute, a cross-disciplinary research institution based at the London School of Economics and Institut Jean Nicod.^[18] He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy^[19] and in 2009 was awarded the inaugural Claude Lévi-Strauss Prize for excellence of French research in the humanities and social sciences.^[20]

Bibliography[link]

• Le structuralisme en anthropologie (Éditions du Seuil, 1973)
• Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge University Press, 1975)
• On Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
• (with Deirdre Wilson) Relevance. Communication and Cognition (Blackwell, 1986)
• (with David Premack & Ann James Premack, eds.) Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate. (Oxford University Press, 1995)
• Explaining Culture (Blackwell, 1996)
• (Ed.) Metarepresentations: A mutidisciplinary perspective (Oxford University Press, 2000)
• (With Ira Noveck, eds.) Experimental pragmatics (Palgrave, 2004)

See also[link]

• Scott Atran
• Maurice Bloch
• Pascal Boyer

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official page
• Blog at the International Cognition and Culture Institute
• Interview in Edge
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk