 Cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. It encompasses processes such as attention, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge. The processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in the fields of linguistics, anesthesia, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, education, philosophy, anthropology, biology, systemics, logic and computer science. These and other different approaches to the analysis of cognition are synthesized in the developing field of cognitive science, a progressively autonomous academic discipline. In psychology, the term cognition is usually used within an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. Cognitivism and it is the same in cognitive engineering, in a branch of social psychology called social cognition. The term is used to explain attitudes, attribution, and group dynamics. Human cognition is conscious and unconscious, concrete or abstract, as well as intuitive like knowledge of a language and conceptual like a model of a language. It encompasses processes such as memory, association, concept formation, pattern recognition, language, attention, perception, action, problem solving and mental imagery. Traditionally, emotion was not thought of as a cognitive process, but now much research is being undertaken to examine the cognitive psychology of emotion. Research is also focused on one's awareness of one's own strategies and methods of cognition, which is called metacognition. While few people would deny that cognitive processes are a function of the brain, a cognitive theory will not necessarily make reference to the brain or to biological processes compared to your cognitive. It may purely describe behavior in terms of information flow or function. Relatively recent fields of studies such as neuropsychology aim to bridge this gap, using cognitive paradigms to understand how the brain implements the information processing functions see also cognitive neuroscience or to understand how pure information processing systems e.g. computers can simulate human cognition see also artificial intelligence. The branch of psychology that studies brain injury to infer normal cognitive function is called cognitive neuropsychology. The links of cognition to evolutionary demands are studied through the investigation of animal cognition.