In Ancient Rome, a cognitionibus was one of the four offices in the chancellor's Imperial Rome office that helped the emperor in his judicial function.
[1][2][3] It was a formal office function, like the ad legationes.
[4] With the restoration in Hadrian's era, it is possible that the office a libellis dominated the other three: a cognitionibus, a studiis and a censibus.
[7] Marcius Agrippa was a cognitionibus and ab epistulis of Caracalla.
[8] The a cognitionibus appears in works of Cassius Dio and Philostratus performing a job that arranges the order of cases before the emperor and summoning litigants into the auditorium.