Brain and Cognition

Cognition can be described as the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses (www.oxforddictionaries.com). It encompasses processes such as knowledge, attention, short- and long-term memory, working memory, judgment, evaluation, reasoning, computation, problem solving, decision making, comprehension, the production of language, etc.. Human cognition is conscious and unconscious, concrete or abstract, as well as intuitive (as in the knowledge of a language) and conceptual (as in a descriptive model of a language). Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge. Thus they are key to ‘high-level critical’ thinking, learning, and turning information into knowledge.