What is cognition?
Cognition is a term referring to the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension, including thinking, knowing, remembering, judging and problem-solving. These are higher-level functions of the brain which encompass language, imagination, perception and planning (http://psychology.about.com/od/cindex/g/def_cognition.htm). In short, cognition is the mental process, mental activities, or thinking process used by a person during a problem-solving process.
Cognition is a term popularly used in cognitive psychology, so what is cognitive psychology? Cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that focuses on how people process information. It looks at how our minds handle external stimuli and produce responses. Figure 1 is commonly used in cognitive psychology to explain what happens when new information is received from our senses, and how this is transferred to the short-term memory (STM) in our mind and finally to the long-term memory (LTM). The process is also known as the Information Processing Model.
Figure 1 shows how information from the external environment is processed from the sensory memory to the STM and then to the LTM.
Figure 1 Information Processing Model
Another popular theory that relates to information processing is called the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). CLT argues that human cognitive architecture should be taken to be a major consideration when designing instruction. The cognitive architecture consists of mainly the STM and LTM. The STM can hold up to about seven pieces of new information or elements at any one time (Miller, 1956; Baddeley, 1992). Due to this limitation, any form of cognitive process can be overloaded if the task to perform is highly complicated with many interactive elements. The process can be even more challenging if it involves processes like organizing, contrasting and comparing (Cowan, 2000). The information after being processed in STM will be sent to LTM and stored as schemas. A schema is essentially a mental framework for understanding and remembering information. For more information, refer to the following document:
In addition to cognitive psychology, there is another branch of psychology called the behavioral psychology that also has great impacts on learning. The following section will briefly explain what behavioral psychology is about. What is behavioral psychology about?
The stimulus-response theory is central to the behavioral psychology. The basic assumption of behavioral psychology is that human behavior is learned; it is gradually shaped as a result of enforcement, with reinforcement typically being a stimulus or reward for a desired response. This theory has been commonly used in animal training as shown in Figure 2. In Figure 2, the rat moved around in a box in which it would accidentally knock a lever. When this happened, food would drop into a container next to the lever. After a few trials, the rat quickly learned the relationship of "pushing a lever to get a response". To encourage the rat to repeat the stimulus-response behaviour, the food is used as a positive reinforcement so that food is associated with the response. The stimulus-response effect is coined by B.F. Skinner (1938) as operant conditioning to denote the effect of changing of behavior by the use of reinforcement which is given after the desired response.
In education, behavioral psychology can be applied to encourage desired performance, for example, a teacher can tell his students that they will get a prize (reward) such as an iPhone if they get good results (response) in an exam (stimulus). Students are likely to repeat this behavior as it is reinforced by a reward. The result is that they will work harder for exam preparation in order to win the reward. For more on behavioral psychology, you may read the below document "learning_theory_1.pdf".
For a summary of the above discussion, you may also access the following video:
Download the file "savedrecs.txt" given below. In this activity, extract as many email addresses as you can from the given file within 15 minutes, then put the extracted email addresses into an Excel file or a Word document. The tutor will check the number of email addresses each of you has managed to extract.
(Note: The file contains a large number of email addresses. You may use any method you can think of to get as many of them as possible. For instance. you may search for those that contain the sign "@" then do Copy-and-Paste the email addresses to the Excel file) savedrecs.txt Download File (After 15 minutes) How many email addresses have you extracted? 30? 40? or 100? I believe many of you would get around 20 but less than 50. Actually extracting email addresses from such a file is rather tedious even though you may apply the "search-copy-paste" function. How can we speed up the process and do the job more easily?
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