Cognition refers to all the psychological processes used for acquiring knowledge about the environment. Cognitive psychology studies how individuals acquire, store, transform, evaluate, and use information.
The study of cognitive processes is included in the basic definition of psychology. The major cognitive processes include attention, perception, learning, memory, reasoning, thinking, decision-making, problem solving, and language learning.
As you may see, all these processes are used in our everyday life situations. Cognitive psychologists rely heavily on experimental methods in laboratory settings. They work in collaboration with neuroscientists and computer scientists. Research in cognitive psychology generates laws and principles that are meaningfully applied to understand individuals’ behaviors in other settings.