Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...

 in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation

Innovation

Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society...

, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences (especially experimental psychology

Experimental psychology

Experimental psychology is a methodological approach, rather than a subject, and encompasses varied fields within psychology. Experimental psychologists have traditionally conducted research, published articles, and taught classes on neuroscience, developmental psychology, sensation, perception,...

 and evolutionary biology) often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation

Interpretation (logic)

An interpretation is an assignment of meaning to the symbols of a formal language. Many formal languages used in mathematics, logic, and theoretical computer science are defined in solely syntactic terms, and as such do not have any meaning until they are given some interpretation...

of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.

From a linguistics stand-point, cognitive anthropology uses language as the doorway to study cognition. Its general goal is to break language down to find commonalities in different cultures and the ways people perceive the world. Linguistic study of cognitive anthropology may be broken down into three subfields: semantics, syntactics, pragmatics.