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What is Cognition?

Wikipedia: The term cognition (Latin: cognoscere, "to know", "to conceptualize" or "to recognize") refers to a faculty for the processing of information, applying knowledge, and changing preferences. Cognition, or cognitive processes, can be natural or artificial, conscious or unconscious. These processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts. In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. Usage of the term varies in different disciplines. Oxford: the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.

Ambiguity in Cognition Domain of psychology and cognitive science: it usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. Domain of social psychology: it refers to social cognition which explains attitudes, attribution and groups dynamics. Domain of Applied Sciences: states of intelligent entities (humans, human organizations, highly autonomous machines and artificial intelligences). This is because of multi-disciplinary approach to Cognition.

General Approach to Cognition

Reductionist Model: Neurology, which starts with describing the morphology of a single neuron

Holistic Model: Behavior Science, which starts

behavior of animals as attributes and investigates the causation

Cognition Psychology ??

Cognition Psychology ??

Cognition Psychology ??

So???

The answer lies in the Cognition Centre

Clearing the Air: Psychology is the science of behavior and mental processes. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. (Wikipedia) Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities. (Wikipedia) Cognition maybe similar but its roots are fixed firmly into Neurosciences. It is the only one branch of Science among the three. Its birth was sodomized by invention of fMRI and EEG techniques.

Rough Application Map of these disciplines

Neurology

Psychiatry

Psychology

Cognition

Philosophers Guidestone to Cognition Quantum Studies

Psychology

Meta Physics

Epistemology

Ethics

Logic

Philosophy

Emotion

Motivation

Cognition

Mind Process

The Bigger Map

Medicine

Micro-Economics

Sociology

Mathematics

Computer Science

Religion

Anthropology

Philosophy

Linguistics

Neurology, Psychiatry & Psychology

Systemics

Anaesthesia

Creed

Cognition

Some recent papers to elucidate the link

Cognition in Evolution (Life Sciences): Cognitive development in children with chronic protein energy malnutrition Bhoomika R Kar, Shobini L Rao, and B A Chandramouli Abstract Background: Malnutrition is associated with both structural and functional pathology of the brain. A wide range of cognitive deficits has been reported in malnourished children. Effect of chronic protein energy malnutrition (PEM) causing stunting and wasting in children could also affect the ongoing development of higher cognitive processes during childhood (>5 years of age). The present study examined the effect of stunted growth on the rate of development of cognitive processes using neuropsychological measures. Methods: Twenty children identified as malnourished and twenty as adequately nourished in the age groups of 5–7 years and 8–10 years were examined. NIMHANS neuropsychological battery for children sensitive to the effects of brain dysfunction and age related improvement was employed. The battery consisted of tests of motor speed, attention, visuospatial ability, executive functions, comprehension and learning and memory Results: Development of cognitive processes appeared to be governed by both age and nutritional status. Malnourished children performed poor on tests of attention, working memory, learning and memory and visuospatial ability except on the test of motor speed and coordination. Age related improvement was not observed on tests of design fluency, working memory, visual construction, learning and memory in malnourished children. However, age related improvement was observed on tests of attention, visual perception, and verbal comprehension in malnourished children even though the performance was deficient as compared to the performance level of adequately nourished children. Conclusion: Chronic protein energy malnutrition (stunting) affects the ongoing development of higher cognitive processes during childhood years rather than merely showing a generalized cognitive impairment. Stunting could result in slowing in the age related improvement in certain and not all higher order cognitive processes and may also result in long lasting cognitive impairments

Cognition in Linguistics and Modulation: Individuating and Ordering Situations in Bangla Samir Karmakar Abstract The paper investigates complex predicate and serial verb constructions to explore how the meaning construing capacities of different syntactic categories are determined by the underlying structure of the construal specific communicative intents. In doing so, I have discussed the role of participle in integrating the argument structures and lexical aspects into the resultant construal. It is also shown how the concepts, like sequentiality and simultaneity, remain significant in determining different types of grammatical constraints while construing an interpretation.

Cognition in Linguistics and Philosophy:

Indian cognitivism and the phenomenology of conceptualization Rajesh Kasturirangan , Nirmalya Guha and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad Abstract We perform conceptual acts throughout our daily lives; we are always judging others, guessing their intentions, agreeing or opposing their views and so on. These conceptual acts have phenomenological as well as formal richness. This paper attempts to correct the imbalance between the phenomenal and formal approaches to conceptualization by claiming that we need to shift from the usual dichotomies of cognitive science and epistemology such as the formal/empirical and the rationalist/empiricist divides—to a view of conceptualization grounded in the Indian philosophical notion of “valid cognition”. Methodologically, our paper is an attempt at cross-cultural philosophy and cognitive science; ontologically, it is an attempt at marrying the phenomenal and the formal.

Cognition in mind and movement process : Evidence for effector independent and dependent representations and their differential time course of acquisition during motor sequence Learning Raju S. Bapi · Kenji Doya · Alexander M. Harner Abstract. To investigate the representation of motor sequence, we tested transfer effects in a motor sequence learning paradigm. We hypothesize that there are two sequence representations, effector independent and dependent. Further, we postulate that the effector independent representation is invisual/spatial coordinates, that the effector dependent representation is in motor coordinates, and that their time courses of acquisition during learning are different. Twelve subjects were tested in a modified 2 10 task. Subjects learned to press two keys (called a set) successively on a keypad in response to two lighted squares on a 3 3 display. The complete sequence to be learned was composed of ten such sets, called a hyperset. Training was given in the normal condition and Sequence recall was assessed in the early, intermediate, and late stages in three conditions, normal, visual, and motor. In the visual condition, finger-keypad mapping was rotated 90° while the keypad-display mapping was kept identical to normal. In the motor condition, the keypad-display mapping was alsorotated 90°, resulting in an identical finger-display mapping as in normal. Subjects formed two groups with each group using a different normal condition. One group learned the sequence in a standard keypad-hand setting and subsequently recalled the sequence using a rotated keypad-hand setting in the test conditions. The second group learned the sequence with a rotated keypad-hand setting and subsequently recalled the sequence with a standard keypad-hand setting in the test conditions. Response time (RT) and sequencing errors during recall were recorded. Although subjects Committed more sequencing errors in both testing conditions, visual and motor, as compared to the normal condition, the errors were below chance level. Sequencing errors did not differ significantly between visual and motor conditions. Further, the sequence recall accuracy was over 70% even by the early stage when the subjects performed the sequence for the first time with the altered conditions, visual and motor. There were parallel improvements thereafter in all the conditions. These results of positive transfer of sequence knowledge across conditions that use dissimilar finger movements point to an effector independent sequence representation, possibly in visual/spatial coordinates. Initially the RTs were similar in the visual and the motor conditions, but with training RTs in the motor condition became significantly shorter than in the visual condition, as revealed by significant interaction for the testing stage and condition term in the repeated measures ANOVA. Moreover, using RTs for singlekey pressing in the three conditions as baseline a ndices, it was again observed that RTs in the visualand motor conditions were not significantly different in the early stage, but motor RTs becames ignificantly shorter by the late testing stage.

Cognition in Statistics (Theoritical Sciences): AA Bayesian approach to modeling dynamic effective connectivity with fMRI data Sourabh Bhattacharyaa, Moon-Ho Ringo Hob, Sumitra Purkayasthad, Abstract A state-space modeling approach for examining dynamic relationship between multiple brain regions was proposed in Ho, Ombao and Shumway (Ho, M.R., Ombao, H., Shumway, R., 2005. A State-Space Approach to Modelling Brain Dynamics to Appear in Statistica Sinica). Their approach assumed that the quantity representing the influence of one neuronal system over another, or effective connectivity, is time-invariant. However, more and more empirical evidence suggests that the connectivity between brain areas may be dynamic which calls for temporal modeling of effective connectivity. A Bayesian approach is proposed to solve this problem in this paper. Our approach first decomposes the observed time series into measurement error and the BOLD (blood oxygenation level-dependent) signals. To capture the complexities of the dynamic processes in the brain, region-specific activations are subsequently modeled, as a linear function of the BOLD signals history at other brain regions. The coefficients in these linear functions represent effective connectivity between the regions under consideration. They are further assumed to follow a random walk process so to characterize the dynamic nature of brain connectivity. We also consider the temporal dependence that may be present in the measurement errors. ML-II method (Berger, J.O., 1985. Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis (2nd ed.). Springer, New York) was employed to estimate the hyperparameters in the model and Bayes factor was used to compare among competing models. Statistical inference of the effective connectivity coefficients was based on their posterior distributions and the corresponding Bayesian credible regions (Carlin, B.P., Louis, T.A., 2000. Bayes and Empirical Bayes Methods for Data Analysis (2nd ed.). Chapman and Hall, Boca Raton). The proposed method was applied to a functional magnetic resonance imaging data set and results support the theory of attentional control network and demonstrate that this network is dynamic in nature.