Urbanization is one of the most drastic alterations of natural habitats, causing sudden adaptive mismatches that make population persistence difficult for many organisms. Urban contexts may be challenging for adaptation, particularly for animals with long generation times with slow evolutionary responses. This chapter argues that cognition may play a major role in facilitating evolutionary adaptation of animals to the urban environment. By regulating how animals gather, preserve, and use information, cognition can influence adaptive evolution in urban areas by (1) allowing individuals to choose the habitats and resources that better match their phenotypes, and (2) helping animals to construct learned responses to challenges they have never or rarely experienced before. These cognitive processes can weaken the strength of selection. However, they can also facilitate adaptive evolution by reducing the risk of population extinction and by ensuring that individuals are more gradually exposed to the new conditions. In addition, cognitive processes can maintain genetic diversity for selection to act upon in the future as well as promoting local adaptation by reducing gene flow with nearby non-urban populations. Finally, learned behaviours can allow the population to move close to the realm of attraction of new adaptive peaks, driving evolution toward novel directions. Cognition itself may also evolve in urban areas—particularly in long-lived generalists—if it exhibits enough heritable variation. Echoing recent suggestions in cognitive ecology, the chapter highlights the need to design and carry out experiments explicitly designed to assess the evolutionary consequences of cognition in urban populations.