What is cognition?

Reading a message may seem like one simple activity. Yet you have to recognize the words, keep the beginning of a sentence in mind, understand what the writer means, and connect it with something you already know. If the message asks you to do something tomorrow, you also need a way to remember that intention.

Cognition is the name for the mental activities involved in taking in information and using it. These include attention, perception, memory, language, learning, and reasoning.

Studying cognition helps us understand how these activities work together. It also helps us explain a difficulty more precisely. Forgetting an instruction, misunderstanding it, and being interrupted before carrying it out can produce the same unfinished task, but they call for different responses.