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Cognition is a term referring to the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension. These cognitive processes include thinking, knowing, remembering, judging, and problem-solving.1 These are higher-level functions of the brain and encompass language, imagination, perception, and planning.
Cognitive psychology is the field of psychology that investigates how people think and the processes involved in cognition.
Types of Cognitive Processes
There are many different types of cognitive processes. These include:
- Attention: Attention is a cognitive process that allows people to focus on a specific stimulus in the environment.
- Language: Language and language development are cognitive processes that involve the ability to understand and express thoughts through spoken and written words. It allows us to communicate with others and plays an important role in thought.
- Learning: Learning requires cognitive processes involved in taking in new things, synthesizing information, and integrating it with prior knowledge.
- Memory:Memory is an important cognitive process that allows people to encode, store, and retrieve information. It is a critical component in the learning process and allows people to retain knowledge about the world and their personal histories.
- Perception: Perception is a cognitive process that allows people to take in information through their senses (sensation) and then utilize this information to respond and interact with the world.
- Thought:Thought is an essential part of every cognitive process. It allows people to engage in decision-making, problem-solving, and higher reasoning.
Uses
Cognitive processes affect every aspect of life, from school to work to relationships. Some specific uses for these cognitive processes include the following.
Learning New Things
Learning requires being able to take in new information, form new memories, and make connections with other things that you already know. Researchers and educators use their knowledge of these cognitive processes to help create instructive materials to help people learn new concepts.
Forming Memories
Memory is a major topic of interest in the field of cognitive psychology. How we remember, what we remember, and what we forget reveal a great deal about how the cognitive processes operate.
While people often think of memory as being much like a video camera, carefully recording and cataloging life events, and storing them away for later recall, research has found that memory is much more complex.
Making Decisions
Whenever people make any type of decision, it involves making judgments about things they have processed. It might involve comparing new information to prior knowledge, integrating new information into existing ideas, or even replacing old knowledge with new knowledge before making a choice.
Impact of Cognition
The cognitive processes have a wide-ranging impact that influences everything from daily life to overall health.
Perceiving the World
As you take in sensations from the world around you, the information that you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell must first be transformed into signals that your brain can understand. The perceptual process allows you to take in sensory information and convert it into a signal that your brain can understand and act upon.2
Forming Impressions
The world is full of an endless amount of sensory experiences. To make meaning out of all this incoming information, it is important for your brain to be able to reduce your experience of the world down to the fundamentals. You remember everything, so events are reduced down to the critical concepts and ideas that you need.3
Filling in the Gaps
In addition to reducing information to make it more memorable and understandable, people also elaborate on these memories as they reconstruct them. In some cases, this elaboration happens when people are struggling to remember something. When the information cannot be recalled, the brain sometimes fills in the missing data with whatever seems to fit.4
Interacting With the World
Cognition involves not only the things that go on inside our heads but also how these thoughts and mental processes influence our actions.5 Our attention to the world around us, memories of past events, understanding of language, judgments about how the world works, and abilities to solve problems all contribute to how we behave and interact with our surrounding environment.
Cognitive Processes
What are cognitive processes? We can understand cognitive processes as the procedures we use to incorporate new knowledge and make decisions based on said knowledge. Different cognitive functions play a role in these cognitive processes: perception, attention, memory, reasoning… Each of these cognitive functions work together to integrate the new knowledge and create an interpretation of the world around us.
- ATTENTION AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS: Attention is the cognitive process that allows us to concentrate on a stimuli or activity in order to process it more thoroughly later. Attention is a fundamental cognitive function for the development of daily situations, and it is used in the majority of tasks that we carry-out day-to-day. In fact, it has been considered a mechanism that controls and regulates the rest of the cognitive processes: from perception (we need attention to be able to pay attention to the stimuli that don’t reach our senses) to learning and complex reasoning.
- MEMORY AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS: Memory is the cognitive function that allows us to code, store, and recover information from the past. Memory is a basic process for learning, as it is what allows us to create a sense of identity. There are many types of memory, like short-term memory, which is the ability to retain information for a short period of time (remember a telephone number until we can write it down on paper), and long-term memory, which are all of the memories that we keep for a long period of time. Long-term memory can be broken into smaller groups, declarative memory and procedural memory. Declarative memory consists of the knowledge that was acquired through language and education (like knowing that World War II ended in 1945), as well as knowledge learned through personal experiences (remembering what my grandma used to make for me). Procedural memory refers to learning though routines (learning how to drive or ride a bike). Other types of memory are auditory memory, contextual memory, naming, and recognition.
- PERCEPTION AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS: Cognitive perception allows us to organize and understand the world through stimuli that we receive from our different senses, like sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. While most people are familiar with the common senses, there are some other, less-known senses, like propioception (stimuli which unconsciously perceives our position in space and judges spatial orientation) and interoception (which is the perception of our organs in our bodies. It is what allows us to know when we’re hungry or thirsty). Once the stimuli is received, our brain integrates all of the information, creating a new memory.
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- LANGUAGE AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS: Language is the ability to express our thoughts and feelings through spoken word. It is a tool that we use to communicate and organize and transmit information that we have about ourselves and the world. Language and thought are developed together and are closely related, they mutually influence each other.
- THOUGHT AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS: Thought is fundamental for all cognitive processes. It allows us to integrate all of the information that we’ve received and to establish relationships between events and knowledge. To do this, it uses reasoning, synthesis, and problem solving (executive functions).
- LEARNING AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS: Learning is the cognitive process that we use to incorporate new information into our prior knowledge. Learning includes things as diverse as behaviors or habits, like brushing our teeth or learning how to walk, and knowledge that we learn through socialization. Piaget and other authors have talked about cognitive learning as the process of information entering our cognitive system and changing it.
The cognitive processes can happen naturally or artificially, consciously or unconsciously, but they usually happen fast. These cognitive processes work constantly and without us realizing them. For example, when we are walking on the street and we see a stoplight turn red, we start the cognitive process that tells us to make a decision (cross or don’t cross). The first thing that we do is focus our attention on the stoplight, through our sight we can see that it is red. In just milliseconds, we recall from our memory that when the stoplight is red you shouldn’t cross. This is probably where we make our first decision: wait until the light turns green, or look right and left (shifting our attention again) to see if any cars are coming and make the decision to cross quickly.
Tips
Cognitive processes are influenced by a range of factors including genetics and experiences. While you cannot change your genetics, there are things that you can do to protect and maximize your cognitive abilities:
- Stay healthy. Lifestyle factors such as eating healthy and getting regular exercise can have an effect on your cognitive functioning.
- Think critically. Question your assumptions and ask questions about your thoughts, beliefs, and conclusions.
- Stay curious and keep learning. One great way to flex your cognitive abilities is to keep challenging yourself to learn more about the world.
- Skip multitasking. While it might seem like doing several things at once would help you get done faster, research has shown it actually decreases both productivity and work quality.
The Cognitive and Productive Costs of Multitasking
Potential Pitfalls
It is important to remember that these cognitive processes are complex and often imperfect. Some of the possible pitfalls that can affect cognition include:
- Problems with attention: Selective attention is a limited resource, so there are a number of things that can make it difficult to focus on everything in your environment. Attentional blink, for example, happens when you are so focused on one thing that you completely miss something else happening right in front of you.
- Memory problems and limitations: Short-term memory is surprisingly brief, typically lasting just 20 to 30 seconds.6 Long-term memory can be surprisingly stable and enduring, on the other hand, with memories lasting years and even decades.7 Memory can also be surprisingly fragile and fallible. Sometimes we forget, and other times we are subject to misinformation effects that can even lead to the formation of false memories.8
- Cognitive biases: Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking related to how people process and interpret information about the world. The confirmation bias is one common example that involves only paying attention to information that aligns with your existing beliefs while ignoring evidence that doesn’t support your views.
Types of Cognitive Biases
History of the Study of Cognition
The study of how we think dates back to the time of the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle.
Philosophical Origins
Plato’s approach to the study of the mind suggested that people understand the world by first identifying basic principles buried deep inside themselves and then using rational thought to create knowledge. This viewpoint was later advocated by philosophers such as Rene Descartes and linguist Noam Chomsky. This approach to cognition is often referred to as rationalism.9
Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that people acquire their knowledge through their observations of the world around them. Later thinkers including John Locke and B.F. Skinner also advocated this point of view, which is often referred to as empiricism.10
Early Psychology
During the earliest days of psychology and for the first half of the twentieth century, psychology was largely dominated by psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and humanism. Eventually, a formal field of study devoted solely to the study of cognition emerged as part of the “cognitive revolution” of the 1960s. The field of psychology concerned with the study of cognition is known as cognitive psychology.
The Emergence of Cognitive Psychology
One of the earliest definitions of cognition was presented in the first textbook on cognitive psychology published in 1967. According to Neisser, cognition is “those processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.”
Can You Improve Cognition?
Is it possible to improve cognition? Below is a tool oriented to improve cognition and cognitive performance:
THE COGNITIVE STIMULATION PROGRAM FROM COGNIFIT: This program was designed by a team of neurologists and cognitive psychologists that study synaptic plasticity and neurogenesis processes. You only need 15 minutes a day (2-3 times a week) to stimulate your cognition. This program is available online, and has specific programs for personal use, researchers, health professionals, and schools.
The cognitive stimulation exercises from CogniFit effectively assess more than 20 fundamental cognitive functions, which are clearly defined and subject to an objective target control, which provides standardized results of age and demographic criteria based on thousands of results.
The different interactive exercises are presented as fun brain games that you can practice on your computer. After each session, CogniFit will present a detailed picture, showing the evolution of the user’s cognitive state. It also compares their cognitive performance to other users.
If neuroscience and studying brain plasticity has shown us anything, it is that the more we use a neural circuit, the stronger it gets. The cognitive stimulation program from CogniFit works to explore our cognitive processes. Once we are able to understand each individual’s cognitive state, we are offer them a personalized cognitive training program. Focusing on the most challenging tasks will ensure that we are creating and establishing new neural connections, which will get stronger and stronger the more that they are trained.
REDUCE STRESS LEVEL: Stress increases cortisol levels, which attacks the myelin of the axons and impedes information from being efficiently transmitted. If we are able to reduce the stress in our lives, we may be able to improve our cognition, because reducing stress improves synaptic connections. Keeping a positive attitude makes us more creative when solving problems, and probably makes us more cognitively flexible.
MEDITATION: Meditation can also help our cognition. In the last few years, more and more studies have been looking at the effects of meditation on cognitive processes. It requires concentration and conscious attention, which as we said, are important for creating new functional circuits. The study seems to support this idea, and meditation has been related to improvements in attention, memory, executive functions, processing speed, and general cognition.
PHYSICAL EXERCISE: Doing some exercise can also improve it. It doesn’t need to be particularly intense activities. In fact, walking 45 minutes, 3 times a week seems to improve memory and reasoning (executive functions), and practicing Tai-Chi improves mainly executive functioning.
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