What is "cognition" anyway?

The word "cognition" refers to our thinking skills. In neuropsychology, we discuss cognition in terms of 5 main areas (sometimes called "domains") of thinking skills: attention, language, visual-perceptual skills, memory, and executive skills. Social cognition is sometimes also considered as another domain. Let's explore these areas a little further... 

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Attention: The category of attention includes alertness, awareness, attention, concentration, and focusing. This is the ability to tune in to a specific source of information (like the television, the person talking to us, this page of written information); it is like tuning a radio to a specific station, or turning the television to a specific channel. 

We use different levels of attention for different tasks. For example, very familiar, simple, or routine tasks require a low level of attention, which we might refer to as simple attention, or automatic attention. Such tasks might include brushing our teeth or washing our hands. Having a conversation requires a higher level of attention (sometimes called controlled attention), especially if we are having a conversation in a noisy, crowded environment.

Language: The category of language involves the ability to understand or comprehend what other people are saying or what we are reading (called receptive language), and the ability to express our own thoughts effectively (called expressive language). This requires having learned the particular language in the first place, and then being able to access long term memory for specific words, their meanings, and information associated with those words. 

Visual-perceptual skills: This refers to your brain’s ability to accurately interpret 
information that it receives from your eyes. This is important for depth perception, 
perceiving relationships between objects in space, perceiving shapes, patterns, and 
recognizing objects.

Driving is one common task that requires good visual-perceptual skill for several reasons: to keep the car between the appropriate lines on the road, to slow down at just the right speed in order to stop at a stop sign/light (rather than stopping too soon or too late), and also to navigate and remember locations and routes to destinations. 

Memory: Many complex theories and descriptions exist regarding how exactly our 
memory works, and these can be found on the internet if you have interest. However, 
one simple and practical way of understanding memory is to think of it as a file cabinet: papers need to be put in (this is learning); once put in, the papers need to stay there (this is storage); and papers need to be found when needed (this is retrieval).

So, learning, storage, and retrieval are the three main abilities needed for our memory to work. However, good attention and organization are also needed if our memory is to work well. Problems can arise with any one of these components of memory and cause forgetfulness.

For many of us, forgetfulness happens when our attention is divided (when we are distracted by too many things going on at one time, or there is too much on our mind at one time; we can also be distracted by things like physical pain, fatigue, and stress), and to-be-learned information is therefore either not learned (never makes it into the file cabinet), or gets into memory but is not well stored/organized (thrown haphazardly anywhere in the file cabinet, without being put in the right drawer or folder). Information that never makes it into memory is of course not there to be retrieved later. Information that gets into memory but is not well stored/organized is often forgotten until something reminds us or jogs our memory. 

Executive abilities: Synonyms for “executive” include: supervisory, managerial, director, and senior management. Thinking skills that fall in this category are the types of thinking skills needed for directing, supervising, and managing. These abilities include: decision making, planning, organizing, using judgement, logic, reasoning, and anticipating, among others.

This category also includes our ability to monitor ourselves, including monitoring our actions and our emotions, our successes and our mistakes, and the ability to use information from our successes and our mistakes in order to learn and grow and be more successful.

Executive abilities also involve “control,” specifically the ability to control our attention and control our behavior. Controlling our attention involves multitasking (purposefully shifting our attention back and forth from one task to another), and also focusing on one thing while purposefully keeping ourselves from being distracted by other things around us (or avoiding being distracted by our own thoughts).

Controlling behavior involves initiating behavior (taking action to do something when we realize it needs to be done), and inhibiting behavior (stopping ourselves from following through on an urge, impulse, or desire; for example: “biting our tongue”). 

Social Cognition: This area involves all of the more specific cognitive skills that are required for social interaction. This of course requires attention, language, memory, visual-perceptual skills, and executive skills. Social cognition is the application of these more basic cognitive abilities, to social situations. It therefore involves skills such as recognizing emotions from facial expressions, interpreting tone of voice and body language, the ability to understand sarcasm and other forms of non-literal language, and the ability to make judgements about things such as honesty and trustworthiness. 

One additional aspect of cognition/thinking that is important for all of these areas is thinking speed, or processing speed. 

As you might expect, most tasks and activities that we do from day to day don’t require just one area of cognitive ability, but usually involve several areas working together. Having a conversation, for example, requires language, of course, but also attention (attending to what the other person is saying in order to understand them), and memory. 

Driving is quite complex, and requires use of all areas at one moment or another (paying attention to the road, decision making and memory for what route to take and why, visual-perceptual skill for staying between the lines, language for reading road signs, multitasking and avoiding distractions for many reasons, etc.)

In future posts we will look into different ways of improving each of these areas of cognitive skill. We will also look at issues that interfere with these cognitive skills, and ways of addressing those issues. However, at least a basic understanding of these different areas, as I have summarized here, will be helpful for better understanding those future posts.