Cognition Cognition is the process by which the sensory
input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.
In science, cognition is the mental processing that includes the attention of working memory,
comprehending and producing language, calculating, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making.
Various disciplines, such as psychology, philosophy and linguistics all study cognition.
However, the term's usage varies across disciplines; for example, in psychology and cognitive science,
"cognition" usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological
functions.
It is also used in a branch of social psychology called social cognition to explain attitudes,
attribution, and groups dynamics.
In cognitive psychology and cognitive engineering, cognition is typically assumed to be information
processing in a participant’s or operator’s mind or brain.
Cognition is a faculty for the processing of information, applying knowledge, and changing
preferences.
Cognition, or cognitive processes, can be natural or artificial, conscious or unconscious.
These processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably
in the fields of linguistics, anesthesia, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy,
anthropology, systemics, and computer science.
Within psychology or philosophy, the concept of cognition is closely related to abstract
concepts such as mind, intelligence.
It encompasses the mental functions, mental processes (thoughts), and states of intelligent
entities (humans, collaborative groups, human organizations, highly autonomous machines,
and artificial intelligences).
Etymology The word cognition comes from the Latin verb
cognosco (con 'with' + gnōscō 'know'), itself a cognate of the Ancient Greek verb gnόsko
"γνώσκω" meaning 'I know' (noun: gnόsis "γνώσις" = knowledge), so broadly, 'to
conceptualize' or 'to recognize'.
Origins "Cognition" is a word that dates back to the
15th century when it meant "thinking and awareness."Attention to the cognitive process came about more than
twenty-three centuries ago, beginning with Aristotle and his interest in the inner-workings
of the mind and how they affect the human experience.
Aristotle focused on cognitive areas pertaining to memory, perception, and mental imagery.
The Greek philosopher found great importance in ensuring that his studies were based on
empirical evidence; scientific information that is gathered through thorough observation
and conscientious experimentation.
Centuries later, as psychology became a blooming study in Europe and then gaining a following
in America, other scientists like Wilhelm Wundt, Herman Ebbinghaus, Mary Whiton Calkins,
and William James, to name a few, would offer their contributions to the study of cognition.
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) heavily emphasized the notion of what he called introspection;
examining the inner feelings of an individual.
With introspection, the subject had to be careful to describe their feelings in the
most objective manner possible in order for Wundt to find the information scientific.
Though Wundt's contributions are by no means minimal, modern psychologists find his methods
to be quite subjective, and choose to rely on more objective procedures of experimentations
to make conclusions about the human cognitive process.
Herman Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) conducted cognitive studies that mainly examined the function
and capacity of human memory.
Ebbinghaus developed his own experiment in which he constructed over 2,000 syllables
made out of nonexistent words, for instance EAS.
He would then examine his own personal ability to learn these non-words.
He purposely chose non-words as opposed to real words to control for the influence of
pre-existing experience with what the words may symbolize, thus enabling easier recollection
of them.
Ebbinghaus observed and hypothesized a number of variables that may have affected his ability
to learn and recall the non-words he created.
One of the reasons he concluded was the amount of time between the presentation of the list
of stimuli.
His work heavily influenced the study of serial position and its affect on memory, discussed
in subsequent sections.
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) was an influential American female pioneer in the realm of psychology.
Her work also focused on the human memory capacity.
A common theory, called the Recency effect, can be attributed to the studies that she
conducted.
The recency effect, also discussed in the subsequent experiment section, is the tendency
for individuals to be able to accurately recollect the final items presented in a sequence of
stimuli.
Her theory is closely related to the aforementioned study and conclusion of the memory experiments
conducted by Herman Ebbinghaus.
William James (1842-1910) is another pivotal figure in the history of cognitive science.
James was quite discontent with Wundt's emphasis on introspection and Ebbinghaus' use of nonsense
stimuli.
He instead chose to focus on the human learning experience in everyday life and its importance
to the study of cognition.
James' major contribution was his textbook Principles of Psychology that preliminarily
examines many aspects of cognition like perception, memory, reasoning, and attention to name a
few.
Psychology The sort of mental processes described as
cognitive are largely influenced by research which has successfully used this paradigm
in the past, likely starting with Thomas Aquinas, who divided the study of behavior into two
broad categories: cognitive (how we know the world), and affective (how we understand the
world via feelings and emotions).
Consequently, this description tends to apply to processes such as memory, association,
concept formation, pattern recognition, language, attention, perception, action, problem solving
and mental imagery.
Traditionally, emotion was not thought of as a cognitive process.
This division is now regarded as largely artificial, and much research is currently being undertaken
to examine the cognitive psychology of emotion; research also includes one's awareness of
one's own strategies and methods of cognition called metacognition and includes metamemory.
Empirical research into cognition is usually scientific and quantitative, or involves creating
models to describe or explain certain behaviors.
While few people would deny that cognitive processes are a function of the brain, a cognitive
theory will not necessarily make reference to the brain or other biological process (compare
neurocognitive).
It may purely describe behavior in terms of information flow or function.
Relatively recent fields of study such as cognitive science and neuropsychology aim
to bridge this gap, using cognitive paradigms to understand how the brain implements these
information-processing functions (see also cognitive neuroscience), or how pure information-processing
systems (e.g., computers) can simulate cognition (see also artificial intelligence).
The branch of psychology that studies brain injury to infer normal cognitive function
is called cognitive neuropsychology.
The links of cognition to evolutionary demands are studied through the investigation of animal
cognition.
And conversely, evolutionary-based perspectives can inform hypotheses about cognitive functional
systems' evolutionary psychology.
The theoretical school of thought derived from the cognitive approach is often called
cognitivism.
The phenomenal success of the cognitive approach can be seen by its current dominance as the
core model in contemporary psychology (usurping behaviorism in the late 1950s).
Cognition is severely damaged in dementia.
Social process For every individual, the social context in
which he or she is embedded provides the symbols of his or her representation and linguistic
expression.
The human society sets the environment where the newborn will be socialized and develop
his or her cognition.
For example, face perception in human babies emerges by the age of two months: young children
at a playground or swimming pool develop their social recognition by being exposed to multiple
faces and associating the experiences to those faces.
Education has the explicit task in society of developing cognition.
Choices are made regarding the environment and permitted action that lead to a formed
experience.
Language acquisition is an example of an emergent behavior.
From a large systemic perspective, cognition is considered closely related to the social
and human organization functioning and constrains.
For example, the macro-choices made by the teachers influence the micro-choices made
by students..
Piaget's theory of cognitive development For years, sociologists and psychologists
have conducted studies on cognitive development or the construction of human thought or mental
processes.
Jean Piaget was one of the most important and influential people in the field of Developmental
Psychology.
He believed that humans are unique in comparison to animals because we have the capacity to
do "abstract symbolic reasoning."
His work can be compared to Lev Vygotsky, Sigmund Freud, and Erik Erikson who were also
great contributors in the field of Developmental Psychology.
Today, Piaget is known for studying the cognitive development in children.
He studied his own three children and their intellectual development and came up with
a theory that describes the stages children pass through during development.
Common experiments Serial position
The serial position experiment is meant to test a theory of memory that states that when
information is given in a serial manner, we tend to remember information in the beginning
of the sequence, called the primacy effect, and information in the end of the sequence,
called the recency effect.
Consequently, information given in the middle of the sequence is typically forgotten, or
not recalled as easily.
This study predicts that the recency effect is stronger than the primacy effect because
the information that is most recently learned is still in working memory when asked to be
recalled.
On the other hand, information that is learned first still has to go through a retrieval
process.
This experiment focuses on human memory processes.
Word superiority The word superiority experiment presents a
subject with a word or a letter by itself for a brief period of time, i.e. 40ms, and
they are then asked to recall the letter that was in a particular location in the word.
By theory, the subject should be able to correctly recall the letter when it was presented in
a word than when it was presented in isolation.
This experiment focuses on human speech and language.
Brown-Peterson In the Brown-Peterson experiment, participants
are briefly presented with a trigram and in one particular version of the experiment,
they are then given a distractor task asking them to identify whether a sequence of words
are in fact words, or non-words (due to being misspelled, etc.).
After the distractor task, they are asked to recall the trigram which they were presented
with before the distractor task.
In theory, the longer the distractor task, the harder it will be for participants to
correctly recall the trigram.
This experiment focuses on human short-term memory.
Memory span During the memory span experiment, each subject
is presented with a sequence of stimuli of the same kind; words depicting objects, numbers,
letters that sound similar, and letters that sound dissimilar.
After being presented with the stimuli, the subject is asked to recall the sequence of
stimuli that they were given in the exact order in which they were given it.
In one particular version of the experiment, if the subject recalled a list correctly,
the list length increased by one for that type of material, and vice versa if it was
recalled incorrectly.
The theory is that people have a memory span of about seven items for numbers, the same
for letters that sound dissimilar and short words.
The memory span is projected to be shorter with letters that sound similar and longer
words.
Visual search In one version of the visual search experiment,
participants are presented with a window that displayed circles and squares scattered across
it.
The participant is to identify whether there is a green circle on the window.
In the "featured" search, the subject is presented with several trial windows that have blue
squares or circles and one green circle or no green circle in it at all.
In the "conjunctive" search, the subject is presented with trial windows that have blue
circles or green squares and a present or absent green circle whose presence the participant
is asked to identify.
What is expected is that in the feature searches, reaction time, that is the time it takes for
a participant to identify whether a green circle is present or not, should not change
as the number of distractors increases.
Conjunctive searches where the target is absent should have a longer reaction time than the
conjunctive searches where the target is present.
The theory is that in feature searches, it is easy to spot the target or if it is absent
because of the difference in color between the target and the distractors.
In conjunctive searches where the target is absent, reaction time increases because the
subject has to look at each shape to determine whether it is the target or not because some
of the distractors if not all of them, are the same color as the target stimuli.
Conjunctive searches where the target is present take less time because if the target is found,
the search between each shape, stops.
Knowledge representation The semantic network of knowledge representation
systems has been studied in various paradigms.
One of the oldest is the leveling and sharpening of stories as they are repeated from memory
studied by Bartlett.
The semantic differential used factor analysis to determine the main meanings of words, finding
that value or "goodness" of words is the first factor.
More controlled experiments examine the categorical relationships of words in free recall.
The hierarchical structure of words has been explicitly mapped in George Miller's Wordnet.
More dynamic models of semantic networks have been created and tested with neural network
experiments based on computational systems such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), Bayesian
analysis, and multidimensional factor analysis.
The semantics (meaning) of words is studied by all the disciplines of cognitive science.