Cognitive means relating to the mental processes of thinking, learning, understanding, and remembering. When teachers talk about cognitive skills, they mean abilities like reasoning through a math problem, memorizing vocabulary words, or figuring out how a story's plot works.

Your brain performs cognitive tasks constantly: reading these words, making sense of them, and connecting them to things you already know are all cognitive processes. When you work on a puzzle, plan your moves in chess, or try to remember where you left your backpack, you're using your cognitive abilities.

Scientists who study how the brain works are called cognitive scientists or cognitive psychologists. They investigate questions like how people learn languages, why some things are easier to remember than others, and how we make decisions.

Cognitive processes are different from physical or emotional ones. Running a race uses your physical abilities. Feeling happy about winning uses your emotional capacities. But analyzing why you won, remembering the race strategy that worked, and planning how to improve next time? Those are cognitive activities, all happening in your brain as you think.