COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY



Cognitive Psychology



Cognitive Psychology

Introduction

This paper discusses the debate about the nature of higher cognition has included claims that it is symbolic, compositional and systematic, and that it cannot be modelled by associative architectures (Hogg Vaughan 2008). On the other hand it has often been shown that human reasoning does not readily conform to logic, and is better modelled by more content-specific processes such as mental models, that function as analogues. There has been a parallel debate about whether learning is conscious or unconscious, and whether what is learned is rule-based or instance-based. These dichotomies also overlap to some extent with the implicit-explicit distinction . We still lack a clear definition of the nature of higher cognition and, consequently, we are unable to clearly distinguish it from more basic processes.

Discussion

The challenges of studying human cognition are evident when one considers the work of the mind in processing the simultaneous and sometimes conflicting information presented in daily life, through both internal and external stimuli. For example, an individual may feel hunger pangs, the external heat of the sun, and sensations of bodily movement produced by walking while simultaneously talking, listening to a companion, and recalling past experiences. Although this attention to multiple stimuli is a common phenomenon, complex cognitive processing is clearly required to accomplish it. At its inception as a discipline in the nineteenth century, psychology focused on mental processes. However, the prevailing structuralist methods, which analyzed consciousness introspectively by breaking it down into sensations, images, and affective states, fell out of favor early in the twentieth century and were superseded by those of the behaviorists, who replaced speculation about inner processes with the study of external, observable phenomena. One consequence of this situation is that the criteria that neural net models of higher cognition need to fulfil have not been defined. In this paper we propose that higher cognitive processes entail representing and processing explicit relations, whereas basic processes can be identified with associations. This in turn constrains the type of neural net models that are required. 

Although important inroads continued to be made into the study of mental processes—including the work of the Würzburg School, the Gestalt psychologists, the field theory of Kurt Lewin, and Jean Piaget's theories of cognitive development in children—the behaviorist focus remained dominant in the United States through the middle of the twentieth century.

The cognitive psychologist studies human perceptions and the ways in which cognitive processes operate to produce responses. Cognitive processes (which may involve language, symbols, or imagery) include perceiving, recognizing, remembering, imagining, conceptualizing, judging, reasoning, and processing information for planning, problem-solving, and other applications. Some cognitive psychologists may study how internal cognitive operations can transform symbols of the external world, others on the interplay between genetics and environment in determining individual cognitive development and capabilities. Still other cognitive psychologists may focus their studies on how the mind detects, selects, recognizes, and verbally represents features of a particular stimulus. Among the many specific topics investigated by cognitive psychologists are language acquisition; visual and auditory perception; information storage and retrieval; altered states of consciousness; ...