To address the uncertainty of cognitive feature selection in brain atlas, a Degree Centrality based Cognitive Feature Selection Method (DC-CFSM) was proposed. First, the Functional Brain Network (FBN) of the subjects in the cognitive experiment tasks was constructed based on the brain atlas, and the Degree Centrality (DC) of each Region Of Interest (ROI) of the FBN was calculated. Next, the difference significances of the subjects' same cortical ROI under different cognitive states during executing cognitive task were statistically compared and ranked. Finally, the Human Brain Cognitive Architecture-Area Under Curve (HBCA-AUC) values were calculated for the ranked regions of interest, and the performances of several cognitive feature selection methods were evaluated. In the experiments on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data of mental arithmetic cognitive tasks, the values of HBCA-AUC obtained by DC-CFSM on the Task Positive System (TPS), Task Negative System (TNS), and Task Support System (TSS) of the human brain cognitive architecture were 0.669 2, 0.304 0 and 0.468 5 respectively. Compared with Extremely randomized Trees (Extra Trees), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), random forest, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGB), the recognition rate for TPS of DC-CFSM was increased by 22.17%, 13.90%, 24.32% and 37.19% respectively, while its misrecognition rate for TNS was reduced by 20.46%, 29.70%, 44.96% and 33.39% respectively. DC-CFSM can better reflect the categories and functions of the human brain cognitive system in the selection of cognitive features of brain atlas.