UNIT 3 - Cognition

• Cognition


  The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses
• Cognition


  • The mental processes relating to the input and storage of information and how that information is then used to guide your behavior
  • The ability to perceive and react, process and understand, store and retrieve information, make decisions and produce appropriate responses
• Definitions of cognition


  • The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge
  • The ability to use memory, knowledge, experience, understanding, reasoning, imagination and judgement in order to solve problems and adapt to new situations
  • The ability of an organism to solve new problems
  • Sensation, perception, association, memory, imagination, discrimination, judgement and reasoning
  • Cognitive ability
• Cognitive processes


  Sensation and perception, attention, memory, forgetting
• Gestalt laws of perception


  • Principles that describe how the human visual system organizes visual elements into groups or unified wholes

  
• Attention

  1. Selective process where the mind focuses on one stimulus while ignoring others

  2. Depends on interest
• Attention


  Plays a vital role in teaching-learning process, without it learning cannot be effective
• Educational implications of attention


  • Teacher should try to secure attention of students
  • Create conducive environment to concentrate attention
  • Avoid distracting factors
  • Motivate students
  • Use diagrams, figures, pictures, audio-visual aids
  • Use gestures, postures, actions, demonstrations
  • Involve students actively
  • Avoid fear of punishment and rude behaviour
  • Show fair and impartial treatment
• Memory


  The ability to encode, store, retain and subsequently recall information and past experiences
• Types of memory


  • Sensory memory
  • Short-term memory
  • Long-term memory
• Characteristics of memory


  • Capacity
  • Duration
• Forgetting


  Occurs due to retrieval failure, interference, failure to store, and motivated forgetting
• Ebbinghaus forgetting curve


  Reveals a relationship between forgetting and time, showing that information is often lost quickly after it is learned
• Forgetting does not continue to decline until all information is lost, indicating that information stored in long-term memory is surprisingly stable
• Reasons for forgetting


  • Retrieval failure
  • Interference
  • Failure to store
  • Motivated forgetting
• Minimizing forgetting


  Refer to Ebbinghaus and Loftus
• Educational implications of cognition were discussed