Where does cognition collide?

The set of internal processes by which the mind takes in, stores, transforms, and uses information: perception, attention, memory, language, and reasoning treated as the handling of coded representations, on the model of a computer running programs. Neisser's 1967 Cognitive Psychology named and organised this field, casting the mind as an information-processing system whose steps can be inferred from behaviour and timing. The referent here is internal computation over mental representations, the object of laboratory study, and it is not a single knowing faculty set against feeling and willing, not the claim that the mind is bodily action rather than computation, and not a capacity a bacterium could have.[1]

Unit

One mental operation, such as recognising a word or recalling an item, modeled as information handling

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Inferred from reaction times, error rates, and computational models, and increasingly from neuroimaging

Cognition as the knowing part of the mind, one member of a classical three-way division of mental life into knowing, feeling, and willing, so that cognition is precisely what is neither emotion (affection) nor desire and volition (conation). Hilgard's 1980 paper The trilogy of mind: Cognition, affection, and conation traced this partition through Kant and the older faculty tradition and showed how long it has shaped psychology. The referent here is a bounded division of the mind, fixed by what it excludes, and its boundary falls in a different place from the meaning used in cognitive psychology, where the processing of emotion and motivation is itself studied as cognition, and different again from cognition attributed to a living cell.[2]

Unit

The knowing division of the mind, standing apart from feeling and from willing

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Traced through how philosophers and psychologists have divided the mind into knowing, feeling, and willing

Cognition understood not as computation inside a head but as the activity of a living body engaging its world, where perceiving and acting form a single loop that brings forth, or enacts, the world the organism experiences. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's 1991 The Embodied Mind set out this enactive view and made embodiment and lived experience central, rejecting the picture of the mind as a device that builds internal models of a ready-made world. The referent here is embodied, world-involving action, offered as a rival to the information-processing meaning, and it is not the knowing faculty of the old trilogy, though it shares an intellectual lineage with the biological meaning of cognition as a property of life.[3]

Unit

One loop of perception and bodily action through which an organism engages its world

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Studied through sensorimotor coupling, real-time behaviour, and first-person experience rather than internal codes

Cognition as a basic adaptive capacity of living systems, the process by which any organism, down to a single bacterium or a plant, detects what matters in its surroundings and responds to keep itself alive. Lyon's 2006 paper The biogenic approach to cognition argued that cognition should be understood from its biological origins outward, as something life does, rather than from the human case inward. The referent here is a property of life itself, present where there is no brain and no experience of the human kind, and it is far removed from a laboratory model of information processing, from a faculty of knowing in a trilogy of mind, and even from the embodied action of a whole perceiving animal.[4]

Unit

One organism's adaptive response to its surroundings, down to a single cell

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Not applicable

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Assessed by how a living system detects, values, and responds to its environment, from bacteria to plants