In science, cognition is the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge:
attention, memory & working memory, judgement & evaluation, reasoning & "computation", problem
solving & decision making, comprehension & production of language, etc. Cognition is by humans conscious
and unconscious, concrete or abstract, as well as intuitive and conceptual. Cognitive
processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.
These processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably
in the fields of linguistics, anesthesia, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy,
anthropology, biology, 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, and states of intelligent entities.
Thus, 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 group 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 can in some specific and abstract
sense also be artificial.
Etymology The word cognition comes from the Latin verb
cognosco, itself a cognate of the Ancient Greek verb gi(g)nόsko "γι(γ)νώσκω"
meaning 'I know, perceive', 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 burgeoning field of study in Europe and then gained 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 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 his or her 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 experimentation to
make conclusions about the human cognitive process.
Herman Ebbinghaus 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 then examined 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 on what the words
might 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 and the. His work heavily influenced the study of serial position and
its affect on memory, discussed in subsequent sections.
Mary Whiton Calkins 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 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, and affective.
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. 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, or how pure information-processing
systems can simulate cognition. 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. 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. 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, Bayesian analysis, and multidimensional factor analysis. The semantics of words is
studied by all the disciplines of cognitive science.
See also
References
Further reading Coren, Stanley; Lawrence M. Ward; James T.
Enns. Sensation and Perception. Harcourt Brace. p. 9. ISBN 0-470-00226-3.
Lycan, W.G.,.. Mind and Cognition: An Anthology, 2nd Edition. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers,
Inc. Stanovich, Keith. What Intelligence Tests
Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12385-2.
Lay summary. External links
Cognition An international journal publishing theoretical and experimental papers on the
study of the mind. Information on music cognition, University
of Amsterdam Cognitie.NL Information on cognition research,
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and University of Amsterdam
Emotional and Decision Making Lab, Carnegie Mellon, EDM Lab
The Limits of Human Cognition - an article describing the evolution of mammals' cognitive
abilities Half-heard phone conversations reduce cognitive
performance The limits of intelligence Douglas Fox, Scientific
American, 14 June 14, 2011.