This paper presents a cognitive state estimation system focused on some effective feature extraction based on temporal and spectral analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) signal and the proper channel selection of the BIOPAC automated EEG analysis system. In the proposed approach, different frequency components (i) real value; (ii) imaginary value; (iii) magnitude; (iv) phase angle and (v) power spectral density of the EEG data samples during different mental task performed to assess seven types of human cognitive states — relax, mental task, memory related task, motor action, pleasant, fear and enjoying music on the three channels of BIOPAC EEG data acquisition system — EEG, Alpha and Alpha RMS signal. Also the time and time-frequency-based features were extracted to compare the performance of the system. After feature extraction, the channel efficacy is evaluated by support vector machine (SVM) based on the classification rate in different cognitive states. From the experimental results and classification accuracy, it is determined that the overall accuracy for alpha channel shows much improved result for power spectral density than the other frequency based features and other channels. The classification rate is 69.17% for alpha channel whereas for EEG and alpha RMS channel it is found 47.22% and 32.21%, respectively. For statistical analysis standard deviation shows better result for alpha channel and it is found 65.4%. The time-frequency analysis shows much improved result for alpha channel also. For the mean value of DWT coefficients the accuracy is highest and it is 81.3%. Besides the classification accuracy, SVM shows better performance in compare with kNN classifier.