Meaning & use
cognition
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Meanings
noununcountabletechnical
The mental activity of taking in information, thinking about it, remembering it, and using it to understand the world.
Grammar: Usually uncountable: research on cognition, not a cognition.
Patterns
- cognition in something
- the study of cognition
Psychologists study how sleep affects cognition.
Reading to children helps the growth of early cognition.
Age can slow cognition, but healthy habits help.
nouncountablespecialist
A single thought, perception, or piece of knowledge produced by this kind of mental activity.
Grammar: Plural cognitions appears mostly in psychology: negative cognitions.
Patterns
- a cognition about something
Therapists help clients challenge unhelpful cognitions.
Each cognition about danger raised her anxiety.
He recorded the cognitions that came up during meditation.
Word forms
| plural | cognitions |
|---|
Common combinations
- social cognition
- Social cognition explains how we read other people's intentions.
- impaired cognition
- The illness caused impaired cognition in some patients.
- improve cognition
- Regular exercise may improve cognition in older adults.
- human cognition
- The book explores the limits of human cognition.
- animal cognition
- Studies of animal cognition show that crows can plan.
- decline in cognition
- Doctors noticed a gradual decline in cognition.
Synonyms and how they differ
- thinking
- Thinking is the everyday word, while cognition is a scientific term covering memory, attention, and perception too.
- intellect
- Intellect names the power or ability to reason, whereas cognition refers to the mental processes themselves.
- perception
- Perception is only the act of noticing through the senses, which is one part of cognition.
- reasoning
- Reasoning means working out conclusions logically, a narrower activity within cognition.
Opposites
Word family
- cognitive adjective
- related to thinking and understanding
- cognitively adverb
- in terms of mental processes
- recognition noun
- identifying something known; related by root
- cognizant adjective
- aware of something
Commonly confused: cognition or recognition?
cognition vs recognition
Recognition is knowing someone or something you have met before, whereas cognition is the whole process of thinking and knowing.
Practice
A researcher who studies how memory, attention, and reasoning work is studying ___.
Choose one answer.
Cognition covers mental processes such as memory and reasoning. The other nouns look similar but have different meanings.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “cognition”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.