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MENTAL PROCESS
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
(psychology) the performance of some composite cognitive activity; an operation that affects mental contents
Example:
the cognitive operation of remembering
Synonyms:
cognitive operation; cognitive process; mental process; operation; process
Classified under:
Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents
Hypernyms ("mental process" is a kind of...):
cognition; knowledge; noesis (the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning)
Domain category:
psychological science; psychology (the science of mental life)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "mental process"):
basic cognitive process (cognitive processes involved in obtaining and storing knowledge)
higher cognitive process (cognitive processes that presuppose the availability of knowledge and put it to use)
Context examples:
They were mental processes, but love was beyond reason; it was superrational.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
Or else he probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in their mental processes and examining their souls as though to see of what soul-stuff is made.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
He had lived life, and seen things, and performed that prodigy of prodigies, namely, the turning of his back upon his own people, and, in so far as it was possible for an Indian, becoming a white man even in his mental processes.
(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)
He followed her mental processes more clearly now, and her soul was no longer the sealed wonder it had been.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
They went wholly by holding the irons close to their cheeks, gauging the heat by some secret mental process that Martin admired but could not understand.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
The writing of it was the culminating act of a long mental process, the drawing together of scattered threads of thought and the final generalizing upon all the data with which his mind was burdened.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
