A generic term involving high level functions such as recognising, concept formation, imagining, judging, problem solving, reasoning, remembering, and thinking. Applied to the social domain (i.e., social cognition),it refers to how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions. It is intimately related to perception and difficult to distinguish from it as, for example, when studying attentional processes. Perhaps the first person to use the term ‘cognition’ was St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who regarded it as ‘how we know the world’ and distinguished it from ‘affect’ (feelings; emotions) and conation (the act of willing something). On this basis, cognition as a general concept came to mean psychological processes or functions for acquiring knowledge and understanding the world.
See Attention, Cognitive structures, Cognitive development, Developmental epistemology, Perception, Problem solving, Reasoning (psychology)