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Introduction: In recent decades, different views among cognitive researchers on how cognition is formed in animals, especially humans have been emerged. Cognition and cognitive processes involve many mental processes such as attention, knowledge formation, memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and calculation, problem solving and decision making, perception and language production. Aim: Investigation and comparison of emerging approaches in the study of cognition. Method: Review of literature. Results: New approaches to cognition such as the concepts of embodied and embedded cognition, grounded cognition, enactive cognition, and situated cognition have been compared with each other and with computational cognition as well. The findings show that the boundary between the types of new approaches in the study of cognition is so narrow that they are sometimes not even easily distinguishable from each other. Furthermore, all emerging approaches in the study of cognition are very different from the computational approach in the study of cognition. Conclusion: The new approach to cognitive science describes cognition with a variety of attributes, most of which indicate that the new approach in the cognitive science has moved away from a purely amodal, computational approach and has opened the door to experience and the environment.

The discussion about the formation of human`s conceptual and cognitive system has been ongoing throughout history and different theories have been presented in this regard. Among the theories that have been advanced during the last 3 decades, there are some well-known viewpoints that emphasize the role of human embedded information processing in the formation of conceptual and cognitive processes. It is believed that cognition is grounded and cognitive processing depends on the environment on the one hand and the bodily sensorymotor system on the other. Our aim in this article is to review some theories of knowledge acquisition in cognitive psychology and cognitive science as well as modality-specific and the so called amodal systems of knowledge representation in the mind.