Lateral thinking is a manner of solving problems using an indirect and creative approach via reasoning that is not immediately obvious. It involves ideas that may not be obtainable using only traditional step-by-step logic.
Cognition refers to “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”. It encompasses many aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as attention, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and “computation”, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.