Cognition in the context of Cognitive categorization

Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking truth. It is associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, religion, science, language, and mathematics, and is normally considered to be a distinguishing ability possessed by humans. Reason is sometimes referred to as rationality, although the latter is more about its application.

Reasoning involves using more-or-less rational processes of thinking and cognition to extrapolate from one's existing knowledge to generate new knowledge, and involves the use of one's intellect. The field of logic studies the ways in which humans can use formal reasoning to produce logically valid arguments and true conclusions. Reasoning may be subdivided into forms of logical reasoning, such as deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and abductive reasoning.

In psychology, an attitude "is a summary evaluation of an object of thought. An attitude object can be anything a person discriminates or holds in mind". Attitudes include beliefs (cognition), emotional responses (affect) and behavioral tendencies (intentions, motivations). In the classical definition an attitude is persistent, while in more contemporary conceptualizations, attitudes may vary depending upon situations, context, or moods.

While different researchers have defined attitudes in various ways, and may use different terms for the same concepts or the same term for different concepts, two essential attitude functions emerge from empirical research. For individuals, attitudes are cognitive schema that provide a structure to organize complex or ambiguous information, guiding particular evaluations or behaviors. More abstractly, attitudes serve higher psychological needs: expressive or symbolic functions (affirming values), maintaining social identity, and regulating emotions. Attitudes influence behavior at individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. Attitudes are complex and are acquired through life experience and socialization. Key topics in the study of attitudes include attitude strength, attitude change, and attitude-behavior relationships. The decades-long interest in attitude research is due to the interest in pursuing individual and social goals, an example being the public health campaigns to reduce cigarette smoking.

Speech is the use of the human voice as a medium for language. Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, such as informing, declaring, asking, persuading, directing; acts may vary in various aspects like enunciation, intonation, loudness, and tempo to convey meaning. Individuals may also unintentionally communicate aspects of their social position through speech, such as sex, age, place of origin, physiological and mental condition, education, and experiences.

While normally used to facilitate communication with others, people may also use speech without the intent to communicate. Speech may nevertheless express emotions or desires; people talk to themselves sometimes in acts that are a development of what some psychologists (e.g., Lev Vygotsky) have maintained is the use of silent speech in an interior monologue to vivify and organize cognition, sometimes in the momentary adoption of a dual persona as self addressing self as though addressing another person. Solo speech can be used to memorize or to test one's memorization of things, and in prayer or in meditation.

Human intelligence is the intellectual capability of humans, which is marked by complex cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness. Using their intelligence, humans are able to learn, form concepts, understand, and apply logic and reason. Human intelligence is also thought to encompass their capacities to recognize patterns, plan, innovate, solve problems, make decisions, retain information, and use language to communicate.

There are conflicting ideas about how intelligence should be conceptualized and measured. In psychometrics, human intelligence is commonly assessed by intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, although the validity of these tests is disputed. Several subcategories of intelligence, such as emotional intelligence and social intelligence, have been proposed, and there remains significant debate as to whether these represent distinct forms of intelligence.

A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the surroundings through the detection of stimuli. Although, in some cultures, five human senses were traditionally identified as such (namely sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing), many more are now recognized. Senses used by non-human organisms are even greater in variety and number. During sensation, sense organs collect various stimuli (such as a sound or smell) for transduction, meaning transformation into a form that can be understood by the brain. Sensation and perception are fundamental to nearly every aspect of an organism's cognition, behavior and thought.

In organisms, a sensory organ consists of a group of interrelated sensory cells that respond to a specific type of physical stimulus. Via cranial and spinal nerves (nerves of the central and peripheral nervous systems that relay sensory information to and from the brain and body), the different types of sensory receptor cells (such as mechanoreceptors, photoreceptors, chemoreceptors, thermoreceptors) in sensory organs transduct sensory information from these organs towards the central nervous system, finally arriving at the sensory cortices in the brain, where sensory signals are processed and interpreted (perceived).

In their most common sense, thought and thinking refer to cognitive processes that occur independently of direct sensory stimulation. Core forms include judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, and deliberation. Other processes, such as entertaining an idea, memory, or imagination, are also frequently considered types of thought. Unlike perception, these activities can occur without immediate input from the sensory organs. In a broader sense, any mental event—including perception and unconscious processes—may be described as a form of thought. The term can also denote not the process itself, but the resulting mental states or systems of ideas.

A variety of theories attempt to explain the nature of thinking. Platonism holds that thought involves discerning eternal forms and their interrelations, distinguishing these pure entities from their imperfect sensory imitations. Aristotelianism interprets thinking as instantiating the universal essence of an object within the mind, derived from sense experience rather than a changeless realm. Conceptualism, closely related to Aristotelianism, identifies thinking with the mental evocation of concepts. Inner speech theories suggest that thought takes the form of silent verbal expression, sometimes in a natural language and sometimes in a specialized "mental language," or Mentalese, as proposed by the language of thought hypothesis. Associationism views thought as the succession of ideas governed by laws of association, while behaviorism reduces thinking to behavioral dispositions that generate intelligent actions in response to stimuli. More recently, computationalism compares thought to information processing, storage, and transmission in computers.

Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of states or objects either internal to one's self or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied, or can even be considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with mind, and at other times, an aspect of it.

In the past, consciousness meant one's "inner life": the world of introspection, private thought, imagination, and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling, or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, metacognition, or self-awareness, either continuously changing or not. There is also a medical definition that helps, for example, to discern "coma" from other states. The disparate range of research, notions, and speculations raises some curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.

A concept is an abstract idea that serves as a foundation for more concrete principles, thoughts, and beliefs.Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied within such disciplines as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences. The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach, cognitive science.

In contemporary philosophy, three understandings of a concept prevail:

Human behavior is the potential and expressed capacity (mentally, physically, and socially) of human individuals or groups to respond to internal and external stimuli throughout their life. Behavior is driven by environmental and genetic factors that affect an individual. Behavior is also driven, in part, by thoughts and feelings, which provide insight into individual psyche, revealing such things as attitudes and values. Human behavior is shaped by psychological traits, as personality types vary from person to person, producing different actions and behavior.

Human behavior encompasses a vast array of domains that span the entirety of human experience. Social behavior involves interactions between individuals and groups, while cultural behavior reflects the diverse patterns, values, and practices that vary across societies and historical periods. Moral behavior encompasses ethical decision-making and value-based conduct, contrasted with antisocial behavior that violates social norms and legal standards. Cognitive behavior involves mental processes of learning, memory, and decision-making, interconnected with psychological behavior that includes emotional regulation, mental health, and individual differences in personality and temperament.

Behavioral modernity is a suite of behavioral and cognitive traits believed to distinguish current Homo sapiens from other anatomically modern humans, hominins, and primates. Most scholars agree that modern human behavior can be characterized by abstract thinking, planning depth, symbolic behavior (e.g., art, ornamentation), music and dance, exploitation of large game, and blade technologies, among others.

Underlying these behaviors and technological innovations are cognitive and cultural foundations that have been documented experimentally and ethnographically by evolutionary and cultural anthropologists. These human universal patterns include cumulative cultural adaptation, social norms, language, and extensive help and cooperation beyond close kin.

In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rational or irrational. The decision-making process is a reasoning process based on assumptions of values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.

Research about decision-making is also published under the label problem solving, particularly in European psychological research.

Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how a person's cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Professionals in this branch of psychology focus on how injuries or illnesses of the brain affect cognitive and behavioral functions.

It is both an experimental and clinical field of patient-focused psychology. Thus aiming to understand how behavior and cognition are influenced by brain function. It is also concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of behavioral and cognitive effects of neurological disorders. Whereas classical neurology focuses on the pathology of the nervous system and classical psychology is largely divorced from it, neuropsychology seeks to discover how the brain correlates with the mind through the study of neurological patients. It thus shares concepts and concerns with neuropsychiatry and with behavioral neurology in general. The term neuropsychology has been applied to lesion studies in humans and animals. It has also been applied in efforts to record electrical activity from individual cells (or groups of cells) in higher primates (including some studies of human patients).

Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; gut feelings; inner sensing; inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition; and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning. Intuitive knowledge tends to be approximate or heuristic.

The word intuition comes from the Latin verb intueri translated as 'consider' or from the Late Middle English word intuit, 'to contemplate'. Use of intuition is sometimes referred to as responding to a "gut feeling" or "trusting your gut".

An attitude object is any concept or entity around which an attitude forms, integrating both cognition (beliefs) and affect (emotional responses) in a way that shapes how individual evaluate that object. Attitudes toward objects can evolve over time, influenced by various situational and contextual factors. An example of an attitude object is a product (e.g., a car). People can hold various beliefs about cars (cognitions, e.g., that a car is fast) as well as evaluations of those beliefs (affect, e.g., they might like or enjoy that the car is fast). Together these beliefs and affective evaluations of those beliefs represent an attitude toward the object.

Attitude objects also play a significant role in shaping and determining the functions of attitudes, which can be classified as utilitarian, social identity, or self-esteem maintenance functions. The utilitarian function involves attitudes toward objects that provide direct benefits (e.g., coffee or air conditioners), which help maximize rewards or minimize discomfort. As for the social identity function relates to objects (e.g., wedding rings or national flags), which symbolize values and social identity, helping individuals express who they are and their affiliations. Lastly, the self-esteem maintenance function involves objects that impact self-worth (e.g., personal attributes, help boost, and protect one's self-esteem).

Understanding is a cognitive process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to use concepts to model that object.Understanding is a relation between the knower and an object of understanding. Understanding implies abilities and dispositions with respect to an object of knowledge that are sufficient to support intelligent behavior.

Understanding is often, though not always, related to learning concepts, and sometimes also the theory or theories associated with those concepts. However, a person may have a good ability to predict the behavior of an object, animal or system—and therefore may, in some sense, understand it—without necessarily being familiar with the concepts or theories associated with that object, animal, or system in their culture. They may have developed their own distinct concepts and theories, which may be equivalent, better or worse than the recognized standard concepts and theories of their culture. Thus, understanding is correlated with the ability to make inferences.