cognition

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.
• noun That which comes to be known, as through perception, reasoning, or intuition; knowledge.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun Knowledge, or certain knowledge, as from personal view or experience; perception; cognizance.
• noun A mental act or process, or the product of an act, of the general nature of knowing or learning.
• noun The formation of a concept, judgment, or argument, or that which is formed; the acquisition of knowledge by thinking, or the knowledge itself.
• noun A mental representation (the act or the product) which, by the operation of sensory perception or thought, is made to correspond to an external object, though not, it may be, accurately. The word cognitio was the ordinary scholastic term in this sense. Cognition was occasionally used by Hobbes, Cudworth, and other writers whose vocabulary was strongly influenced by the Latin, but is rarely met with in later English before Hamilton.
• noun In old Scots law, a process in the Court of Session by which cases concerning disputed marches were determined.
• noun Same as cognizance, 2.
• noun Cognition by direct insight, and not by ratiocination.
• noun Present perception of an object, with consciousness of it as an object.
• noun Knowledge more or less readily capable of practical application: opposed to speculative or metaphysical cognition, which is either incapable or not readily capable of such application.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The act of knowing; knowledge; perception.
• noun That which is known.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun The process of knowing.
• noun countable A result of a cognitive process.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning