User:MatthewSchaublin/Cognition

In psychology, the term "cognition" is usually used within an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions, and such is the same in cognitive engineering. In the study of social cognition, a branch of social psychology, the term is used to explain attitudes, attribution, and group dynamics. However, psychological research within the field of cognitive science has also suggested an embodied approach to understanding cognition. Contrary to the traditional computationalist approach, embodied cognition emphasizes the body's significant role in the acquisition and development of cognitive capabilities.

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). It encompasses processes such as memory, association, concept formation, pattern recognition, language, attention, perception, action, problem solving, and mental imagery. Traditionally, emotion was not thought of as a cognitive process, but now much research is being undertaken to examine the cognitive psychology of emotion; research is also focused on one's awareness of one's own strategies and methods of cognition, which is called metacognition.

 (While few people would deny that cognitive processes are a function of the brain, a cognitive theory will not necessarily make reference to the brain or to biological processes (cf. neurocognitive). It may purely describe behavior in terms of information flow or function. 

' Relatively recent fields of study such as neuropsychology aim to bridge this gap, using cognitive paradigms to understand how the brain implements the information-processing functions (cf. cognitive neuroscience), or to understand how pure information-processing systems (e.g., computers) can simulate human cognition (cf. artificial intelligence). '

' The branch of psychology that studies brain injury to infer normal cognitive function is called cognitive neuropsychology. The links of cognition to evolutionary demands are studied through the investigation of animal cognition.) '

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The concept of cognition has gone through several revisions with disciplines within psychology and their study of the mind. Psychologists initially understood cognition governing human action as information processing. This was a movement known as cognitivism in the 1950s, emerging after the Behaviorist movement viewed cognition as a form of behavior.

Cognitivism approached cognition as a form of computation, viewing the mind as a machine and consciousness as an executive function. Current cognitive science has developed from these prior views informing each other, first that prioritizing the studying of cognition as computation then exclusively as behavior.

However; post cognitivism began to emerge in the 1990s as the development of cognitive science presented theories that highlighted the necessity of cognitive action as embodied, extended, and producing dynamic processes in the mind.

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