Cognition
Cognition is the set of processes by which an agent acquires, processes, represents, and uses information.
AI Agents in Action, Second Edition
Cognition is an agent’s ability to model a task, decompose problems, reason about dependencies, compose tools, and update its understanding from new information.
- How it is used
- Frames agent cognition as the task-modeling capability needed to handle ambiguity, conflicting evidence, and incomplete knowledge.
- How deep it goes
- Defines four observable capabilities and maps them to reasoning primitives, while explicitly stopping short of claims about consciousness.
- Examples
- Illustrates tool composition with separate lookups that must be joined or compared to answer a request.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate agent behavior by checking whether it decomposes novel tasks, respects dependencies, composes tools, and updates its plan.
Read how AI Agents in Action, Second Edition explains cognition →
Inside AI
Living intelligence is the adaptive information-processing capacity exhibited by biological organisms and their cells.
- How it is used
- Frames cognition as biological intelligence for adapting to information, from cellular responses to human thought.
- How deep it goes
- Connects memory, generalization, intuition, and subconscious influence while leaving the mechanisms producing thought unresolved.
- Examples
- Uses measles infection to illustrate immune-cell learning, antibody adjustment, and inherited cellular memory.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate AI claims against human capacities for imagination, intuition, memory, and perception.
Natural Language Processing in Action, Second Edition
Cognition is the set of mental processes involved in acquiring, representing, manipulating, and using knowledge.
- How it is used
- Connects reading and writing with thought to explain why natural language processing is associated with artificial intelligence.
- How deep it goes
- Defines cognition broadly as thought and illustrates it through reading and writing, without detailing underlying mental processes.
- Examples
- Uses composing sentences and paragraphs, and recalling a concept through its word, as examples of thought.
- What you can do after
- Understand why machine text processing is associated with the thinking involved in human reading and writing.
Read how Natural Language Processing in Action, Second Edition explains cognition →
Related concepts
- neural networkcontrasts with · A neural network is a computational model of interconnected, parameterized units that learns transformations from inputs to outputs.
- working memoryincludes · Working memory is a limited, temporary store of information available for immediate access or manipulation during an active task or interaction.
- memoryincludes · Memory is a storage resource or mechanism that retains data or computational state for access during computation or later use.
- problem solvingcontrasts with · Problem solving is the process of analyzing a problem and developing, selecting, or applying a solution to address it.
- codepart of · Code is instructions or declarations expressed in a programming language that specify computational operations or software behavior.
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