cognitive

Cognitive is an adjective that relates to cognition—the mental processes by which knowledge is acquired, stored, retrieved, and used. Core cognitive processes include perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making.

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field that studies mental processes from psychological, neural, computational, linguistic, philosophical, and cultural perspectives. Researchers use experiments, neuroimaging, computational modeling, and behavioral studies to understand how the mind works and how it interacts with the brain and environment.

Key theories include the information-processing approach, which models mental operations as stages of encoding, storage, and retrieval; and connectionist models that simulate cognition with interconnected units akin to neural networks. Dual-process theories distinguish fast intuitive (System 1) and slower analytical (System 2) thinking.

Cognitive development examines how thinking changes across the lifespan, while cognitive biases refer to predictable errors in judgment, such as confirmation bias or the availability heuristic, that arise from heuristics and memory limits.

Applications span education, clinical assessment, human-computer interaction, user experience design, and artificial intelligence, where cognitive principles guide the design of tools and interfaces to align with how people think and learn.

Historically, cognitive science emerged during the mid-20th century as a reaction against behaviorism, with pioneers such as Noam Chomsky, Herbert Simon, and Ulric Neisser contributing to formal theories and empirical methods. The term cognitive commonly appears in disciplines ranging from psychology to philosophy and AI.