Cognitive
psychology is a branch of psychology that focuses on the study of the higher
mental processes including, thinking, language, memory, problem solving,
knowing, reasoning, judging and decision making. The main focus of cognitive
psychology is on how people acquire, process and store information. The term
‘cognitive psychology’ was first used by Psychologist Ulric Neisser in 1967 in
his book Cognitive Psychology. According
to research conducted, it has been shown that cognitive ability is the best
predictors of job and education performance. Many company and schools held
cognitive ability test in order to analysts their employees and students
ability to learn, adapt, solve problems and understand instructions. The
questions often include mathematics, language, analogies, abstract reasoning and
etc.
Thinking is the
manipulation of mental representations of information. A representation may
take the form of a word, visual image, a sound, or data in any other sensory
modality stores in memory. Thinking transform a particular representation of
information into new and different forms, allowing us to answer question, solve
problems or reach goals.
1.1 MENTAL IMAGES
Mental image is a representation in the
mind of an object or event. It assembled in the mind from information real and
imagined, mixtures of sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, opinion and mood
combined with associative memories either conscious or unconscious. Mental
rotation is the ability to rotate mental representations of two-dimensional and
three-dimensional objects. Mental imaginary is very useful to improve many
skills.
Many sportsmen use mental imagery in their training. Basketball players
may try to produce vivid and detailed images of the court, the basket, the ball
and the noisy crowd. They may visualize themselves taking a foul shot, watching
the ball and hearing the swish as it goes through the net. Mental image is not
just visual representation, as ability to hear tunes in our head also rely on
mental image. For instance, piano players who simply mentally rehearse an
exercise show brain activity that is virtually identical to that people who
actually practice the exercise manually. Apparently, carrying out the task
involved the same network of brain cells as the network used in mentally
rehearsing.
Mental image have many of the properties
of the actual stimuli they represent. We are able to manipulate and rotate
mental images of objects just as we are able to manipulate and rotate them in
the real world.
1.2
CONCEPTS
Concepts are mental grouping of similar
objects, events or people. It focused on those clearly defined by unique set of
properties or features. Concept helps us classify new encountered object on the
basis of past experience and enable us to organize complex phenomena into simpler
and easily usable, cognitive categories. Concept can influence behavior. For
instance, we would assume that it might be appropriate to pet an animal after
determining that it is a cat, whereas we would behave differently after
classifying the animal as wolf.
For
more ambiguous concept, we usually think in terms of examples called prototypes
as prototype is a typical, highly representative example of concept. For
instance, although a robin and ostrich are both a bird, the robin is an example
that comes to most people’s mind. Consequently, robin is a prototype of the
concept ‘bird’. However, high agreement exists within a culture about which
examples of concept are prototypes.
1.3
REASONING
Cognitive psychologists have begun to
investigate how people reasons and make decisions and they have contribute d to
our understanding of formal reasoning processes as well as the cognitive
shortcuts we routinely use. There are three types of reasoning which is
syllogistic, algorithms and heuristic reasoning.
1.3.1 SYLLOGISTIC REASONING
It is a formal reasoning in which people
draw a conclusion from a set of assumptions. If the assumption is true, the
conclusion must also be true. For example,
Premise 1 All
professors are mortal
Premise 2 Dr.
Rivera is a professor
Conclusion Therefore,
Dr. Rivera is mortal
However, if the premises are correct,
people may apply logic incorrectly. For example:
Premise 1 All
professors are mortal
Premise 2 Dr.
Rivera is a professor
Conclusion Therefore,
all professors are Dr. Rivera.
1.3.2 ALGORITHM
Algorithm reasoning is a rule that if
applied appropriately, guarantees a solution to a problem even if we cannot
understand how it works. For example, we can find the length of the third side
of a right triangle by using the formula a2+b2=c2.
1.3.3 HEURISTICS
A Thinking strategy that may lead us to
the solution to a problem or decisions but unlike algorithms may sometimes lead
to errors. For example, some students follow the heuristics of preparing for a
test by ignoring the assigned textbook reading and only studying their lecture
notes, a strategy that may or may not pay off.
There are two types of heuristics;
Ø Representativeness
heuristics – a rule we
apply when we judge people by the degree to which they represent certain
category or group of people.
Ø Availability heuristics – judging the probability of an event on the basis of how easily the
event can be recalled from memory.
2 COMPUTER AND PROBLEM SOLVING:
According to the experts who study
artificial intelligence, the field that examines how to use technology to
imitate the outcome of human thinking, problem solving and creative activities,
computers can show rudiments of human like thinking because of their knowledge
of where to look and where not to look for an answer to a problem. Computer’s
thinking ability comes from the capacity of computer’s programs to evaluate
potential moves and ignore unimportant possibilities.
David Cope from University of California
managed to fool expert musicologist by using artificial intelligence software
to mimic compositions of prolific German composer Johann Sebastian Bach who was
born in the 15th century. After a variety actual Bach pieces had
been scanned into a memory of computer named “EMI”, EMI was able to produce the
music so similar to Bach by employing the composer “signature” that reflects
patterns, sequences and combinations of notes.
Notes: This is a part of my paperwork for Psychology class taken last semester. And as usual a quote before I ended this post.
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