Cognition

The term cognition (Latin: cognoscere, "to know" or "to recognize") 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, psychology, philosophy, systemics and computer science. Within psychology or philosophy, the concept of cognition is closely related to abstract concepts such as mind, reasoning, perception, intelligence, learning, and many others that describe capabilities of the mind and expected properties of an artificial or synthetic “mind”. Cognition is considered an abstract property of advanced living organisms and is studied as a direct property of a brain (or of an abstract mind) on at the factual and symbolic levels.

In psychology and in artificial intelligence, cognition is used to refer to the mental functions, mental processes (thoughts) and states of intelligent entities (humans, human organizations, highly autonomous machines). In particular, the field focuses toward the study of specific mental processes such as comprehension, inference, decision-making, planning and learning (see also cognitive science and cognitivism). Recently, advanced cognitive research has been especially focused on the capacities of abstraction, generalization, concretization/specialization and meta-reasoning. This involves such concepts as beliefs, knowledge, desires, preferences and intentions of intelligent individuals, objects, agents or systems.