_____ refers to all those mental processes that deal with obtaining a…

The correct answer is Option (2) → Cognition

Option (1) Social Cognition — Incorrect. Social cognition extends the idea of cognition to the social world: it covers the processes that deal with gathering and processing information related to social objects such as people, groups and relationships. The question speaks of information in general, with no word ‘social’.

Option (2) Cognition — Correct. ‘Cognition’ refers to all those mental processes that deal with obtaining and processing of information, which is the definition given in the question.

Option (3) Scapegoating — Incorrect. Scapegoating is a source of prejudice: the majority group places the blame on a minority outgroup for its own social, economic or political problems. It is not a mental process of handling information.

Option (4) Prototype — Incorrect. Prototypes are schemas that function in the form of categories: the entire set of features that help us define an object completely. A prototype is a unit used in cognition, not the processes themselves.

Note: This definition of ‘cognition’, which opened the section ‘Social Cognition’, was there in the pre-rationalised NCERT, which NTA followed in 2023, and is not there in the NCERT book (2025-26).