- Although biological and social factors affect human behavior, psychology emphasizes affective factors that make individuals self-sufficient and able to direct their own behavior.
- Cognitive processes and affective factors are the key aspects that affect behavior.
- Cognitive processes became a focus of research when technological development raised awareness to the fact that most accidents were caused by human errors.
- Psychologists wondered what the roots of such errors were and took an interest in mental processes, such as human perception, attention, and memory, and especially their limitations.
- This led to the development of cognitive psychology in the early 1950s.
- Although early research was limited to the cognitive processes, modern research focuses on the complex interactions between cognitive functions, emotions, motives and neural processes.
Human Cognition
- Human cognition is a form of information processing.
- We need mental processes to handle everyday situations, even the most simple ones.
The Perceptual Cycle and Cognitive Processes
- Information processing has several cognitive stages: selecting a selecting a stimulus in the environment (attention and perception), encoding the acquired information and using previously learned information to interpret it (thinking and memory), and storing the information for later use (learning and language).
- This process is called the perceptual cycle.
- As stimulus activates and modifies existing schemas which then helps it recognize more instances as we perceive our surroundings and thus notice more stimuli.
- For the perceptual cycle to work we need to pay attention and perceive things, remember and think about it and thus we learn and interpret it (language is the way we think, even in your own head you generally think of things in your native language).
- This means that all cognitive functions are used in the perceptual cycle.
- Perception, attention, thinking, memory, learning and language are called cognitions, cognitive processes or cognitive functions.
- A phenomenon relating to cognitive functions are schemas. Schemas are certain ways in which information is stored in our brains. They affect how we remember, perceive and think about things all around us.