Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, of information about conspecifics (members of the same species). In the area of social psychology, social cognition refers to a specific approach in which these processes are studied according to the methods of cognitive psychology and information processing theory. According to this view, social cognition is a level of analysis that aims to understand social psychological phenomena by investigating the cognitive processes that underlie them. The major concerns of the approach are the processes involved in the perception, judgment, and memory of social stimuli; the effects of social and affective factors on information processing; and the behavioral and interpersonal consequences of cognitive processes. This level of analysis may be applied to any content area within social psychology, including research on intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup processes. However, the term social cognition has also come to be more widely used across other areas of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In these areas, the term social cognition is most often used to refer to various social abilities disrupted in autism, schizophrenia  and other disorders. In cognitive neuroscience the biological basis of social cognition is investigated. Developmental psychologists study the development of social cognition abilities.