Cognition (/kɒɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/ (About this soundlisten)) refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses".It encompasses many aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and "computation", problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge.

Cognitive processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in the fields of linguistics, musicology, 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

Etymology

The word cognition dates back to the 15th century, where it meant "thinking and awareness".The term comes from the Latin noun cognitio ('examination,' 'learning,' or 'knowledge'), derived from the verb cognosco, a compound of con ('with') and gnōscō ('know'). The latter half, gnōscō, itself is a cognate of a Greek verb, gi(g)nÏŒsko (γι(γ)νÏŽσκω, 'I know,' or 'perceive')

Psychology

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.

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.

Common types of tests on human cognition

Serial position

The serial position experiment is meant to test a theory of memory that states that when information is given in a serial manner, we tend to remember information in the beginning of the sequence, called the primacy effect, and information in the end of the sequence, called the recency effect. Consequently, information given in the middle of the sequence is typically forgotten, or not recalled as easily. This study predicts that the recency effect is stronger than the primacy effect, because the information that is most recently learned is still in working memory when asked to be recalled. Information that is learned first still has to go through a retrieval process. This experiment focuses on human memory processes.

Word superiority

The word superiority experiment presents a subject with a word, or a letter by itself, for a brief period of time, i.e. 40ms, and they are then asked to recall the letter that was in a particular location in the word. In theory, the subject should be better able to correctly recall the letter when it was presented in a word than when it was presented in isolation. This experiment focuses on human speech and language.

Brown-Peterson

In the Brown-Peterson experiment, participants are briefly presented with a trigram and in one particular version of the experiment, they are then given a distractor task, asking them to identify whether a sequence of words is in fact words, or non-words (due to being misspelled, etc.). After the distractor task, they are asked to recall the trigram from before the distractor task. In theory, the longer the distractor task, the harder it will be for participants to correctly recall the trigram. This experiment focuses on human short-term memory.

Psychoanalysis is a type of therapy that aims to release pent-up or repressed emotions and memories in or to lead the client to catharsis, or healing. In other words, the goal of psychoanalysis is to bring what exists at the unconscious or subconscious level up to consciousness.

For the upcoming Issue we would again like to quote that the Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy aims to broadcast the latest findings from systematic explorations in the areas of Analytical Psychology, Clinical psychology, Criminal Psychology, Cultural psychology, Developmental Psychology, Educational Psychology, Evolutionary psychology, Experimental psychology, Humanistic psychology, Medical psychology, Music psychology, Neuro psychology, Positive psychology. The Journal with highest impact factor offers Open Access option to meet the needs of authors and maximize article visibility. The journal also lays special emphasis on the emerging challenges in diagnosis, prevention and treatment of Mental and Psychological Disorders and prudent methods of various Psychotherapies involved.
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Adrena Cindrella
Coordinator | Psychology & Psychotherapy