Talk:Cognition

Cognition is currently a Culture, sociology and psychology good article nominee. Nominated by Phlsph7 (talk) at 09:17, 27 August 2025 (UTC) Any editor who has not nominated or contributed significantly to this article may review it according to the good article criteria to decide whether or not to list it as a good article. To start the review process, click start review and save the page. (See here for the good article instructions.) Short description: Mental activity dealing with knowledge

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This article is currently the subject of an educational assignment.

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Changes to the article

I was thinking about implementing changes to this article with the hope of moving it in the direction of GA status. The article has a few unreferenced passages and the maintenance tags 3x citation needed, 1x excessive citations, and 1x page needed.

The current article lacks coverage of several central topics while providing excessive detail on minor subjects. It has very little information on the different types of cognitive processes, such as perception, attention, memory, language, reasoning, and decision-making, which are typically the main topics of overview sources on cognition. Our article focuses primarily on (developmental) psychology but mostly neglects other central disciplines, such as cognitive science, neurology, and philosophy. Additional fields that warrant brief explanations include cognitive linguistics/semantics/grammar/pragmatics, cognitive anthropology, cognitive sociology, and cognitive biology. Furthermore, various theories of cognition should be discussed, such as connectionism, information processing theory, embodied cognition, modularity of mind, Bayesianism, cognitive load theory, and Vygotsky's sociocultural theory.

It makes sense to focus the article primarily on human cognition, but it's not clear why non-human cognition, such as animal cognition, is completely excluded, which hurts comprehensiveness. Etymology is not important enough to get its own section. This could be addressed by adding a definition section and including an etymological explanation there. Having "Improving cognition" as a main section probably violates WP:NOTGUIDE and/or WP:BALANCE. Some of its points could be integrated into other sections to avoid removing the ideas entirely. It's probably a bad idea to have a pseudoscientific illustration as the lead image. The historical discussion is currently limited to "Early studies". Expanding it to a history section that also covers later developments would be beneficial, especially since many core developments happened more recently.

There are more things to consider, but they can be addressed later since the ones mentioned so far will already involve a lot of work to implement. I was hoping to get some feedback on these ideas and possibly other suggestions. Phlsph7 (talk) 16:44, 24 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]