Cognition is an advanced psychological process, mainly cognitive processes, such as attention, perception, representation, memory, thinking and language.

Cognitive psychology is a trend of psychological thought that emerged in the West in the mid-1950s. It is a psychological mechanism that serves as the basis of human behavior. Its core is the internal psychological process that occurs between input and output.

It also has a certain connection with traditional Western philosophy. Its main feature is that it emphasizes the role of knowledge and believes that knowledge is the main factor that determines human behavior.

In contrast to behaviorist psychologists, cognitive psychologists study internal mechanisms and processes that cannot be observed, such as memory processing, storage, retrieval, and changes in memory.

Studying cognitive processes from the perspective of information processing is the mainstream of modern cognitive psychology. It can be said that cognitive psychology is equivalent to information processing psychology.

It regards human beings as an information processing system and believes that cognition is information processing, including the entire process of encoding, storage and retrieval of sensory input.

According to this view, cognition can be decomposed into a series of stages, each stage is a unit that performs certain specific operations on the input information, and the reaction is the product of this series of stages and operations.

All components of an information processing system are interconnected in some way.

With the development of cognitive psychology, this view of sequential processing is increasingly challenged by parallel processing theory and related theories of cognitive neuropsychology.