Cognition

Cognition is "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses." It encompasses processes such as knowledge, attention, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and "computation", problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc. Human cognition is conscious and unconscious, concrete or abstract, as well as intuitive (like knowledge of a language) and conceptual (like a model of a language). Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.

The processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in the fields of linguistics, anesthesia, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, education, philosophy, anthropology, biology, systemics, logic, and computer science. These and other different approaches to the analysis of cognition are synthesised in the developing field of cognitive science, a progressively autonomous academic discipline. Within psychology and philosophy, the concept of cognition is closely related to abstract concepts such as mind and intelligence. It encompasses the mental functions, mental processes (thoughts), and states of intelligent entities (humans, collaborative groups, human organizations, highly autonomous machines, and artificial intelligences).

Cognition (journal)

Cognition: International Journal of Cognitive Science is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering cognitive science. It was established in 1972 and is published by Elsevier.

History

Cognition is one of the few psychology journals of the 20th century that developed outside of the United States. The journal was initially published quarterly, then every other month from 1982, and finally on a monthly basis since 1985.

Work in the journal is considered "highly cited," and is noted to adequately represent research on an international level. In terms of representing topics within the cognitive sciences, a 2005 meta-analysis demonstrated that the journal primarily publishes work in psychology, with a small proportion of publications in linguistics and neuroscience. The analysis concluded that for several reasons, including the explicit editorial policy of the journal and efforts to create special issues for specific disciplines, that the disparity could not be well explained by editorial bias.