Cognitive Functions of the Brain: Perception, Attention and Memory

TL;DR

This paper provides an overview of key cognitive functions of the human brain, including perception, attention, and memory, highlighting their roles in mental processes and learning.

Contribution

It introduces and explains core cognitive functions of the brain, serving as a tutorial and summarizing recent understanding with references to foundational sources.

Findings

Cognitive functions enable effective understanding and interaction with the world.

Perception, attention, and memory are central to brain's mental processes.

Future work will include additional cognitive functions like decision making and language.

Abstract

This is a follow-up tutorial article of [17] and [16], in this paper, we will introduce several important cognitive functions of the brain. Brain cognitive functions are the mental processes that allow us to receive, select, store, transform, develop, and recover information that we've received from external stimuli. This process allows us to understand and to relate to the world more effectively. Cognitive functions are brain-based skills we need to carry out any task from the simplest to the most complex. They are related with the mechanisms of how we learn, remember, problem-solve, and pay attention, etc. To be more specific, in this paper, we will talk about the perception, attention and memory functions of the human brain. Several other brain cognitive functions, e.g., arousal, decision making, natural language, motor coordination, planning, problem solving and thinking, will be added to this paper in the later versions, respectively. Many of the materials used in this paper are from wikipedia and several other neuroscience introductory articles, which will be properly cited in this paper. This is the last of the three tutorial articles about the brain. The readers are suggested to read this paper after the previous two tutorial articles on brain structure and functions [17] as well as the brain basic neural units [16].