Mathematical modeling and applications are an important part of curriculum and considered to be important for students' current and future lives. In this contribution, we focus on mathematical modeling from a cognitive prospective. Following embedding the cognitive perspective within the discourse of mathematical modeling, we describe some of the current thinking on modeling activities and review empirical results. Subsequently, new findings and implications for research offered by the contributions of the current special issue are described. The contributions of this special issue refer to the relation between cognitive and metacognitive modeling activities to (a) mathematical thinking during building a modeling example, (b) strategic knowledge within modeling activities, (c) solving of data-rich modeling problems and their status from a meta-perspective and (d) individual and social metacognition.