Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Psychology Cognition Cognition What is cognition? It is the general term given for mental activities. In cognitive psychology, it is the study of higher mental processes; memory, attention, language, reasoning etc. in contrast to behaviourists; cognitive psychologists are more ready to posit mechanisms and processes that are not directly observable, such as memory stores and switches of attention. Cognitive research includes several different facets of mental life, such as the use of imagery in representation, processes of decision making and problem solving and reasoning. A First Course in Psychology, Nicky Haynes, 3rd edition, Harrap Ltd, London, Page 202. Cognition is all to do with the memory. The memory is the ability to access information in the mind relating to past experiences and events. The theories of the memory deals with the causes of forgetting; pure decay or interference from other material, and the possibility that there are two or more distinct stores from which the information is forgotten at different rates, short term and long term memory. They also analyse the distinction between episodic memory; the memory of specific events experienced by the individual, and semantic memory; knowledge and the way incoming information and previous knowledge interact in language comprehension and problem solving; the working memory. This is the input stage, where newly perceived information is being learned or encoded. Perception is not just about receiving information with our senses but also about making sense of that information. When we see a picture of a simple shape; a square - all we are actually seeing is a pattern of light waves. But, our brain receives this information and organises it so that we are able to make sense of it and recognise the shape as a square. Our brain does not just use the messages sent via our eyes, but also uses our past experiences of similar shapes and our understanding of those shapes. This involves applying our knowledge of the world around us as well as other cognitive processes. Perception is a continuous cycle, in which what we expect to see affects what we look for and vice versa. Information received is simply held in preparation for some future occasion. As we are storing this information in our sub conscious, it is referred to as long term memory (LTM). The information is stored here ready to be recalled later. LTM holds a vast quantity of information and can be stored for long periods of time. The information kept in our LTM is diverse and wide ranging and it includes all of our personal memories, general knowledge and our beliefs of the world. It also holds our plans for the future and it is the depository for all our knowledge on skills and expertise. Research suggests that we often use semantic categories to help us in our LTM and that visual imagery provides another method. Psychology at AS Level, Cardwell, Clarke & Meldrum, 2nd edition, Harper Collins Ltd 2000, London, Page 6. Researchers have found that LTM had distinctive characteristics. Tulving (1972) made a distinction between episodic and semantic memory. Episodic being the memory for facts, events and episodes, whereas semantic being the 'how to' memory - how to catch a train, how to understand the person talking to you, how to make a cup of tea. However in 1972, Attkinson and Shiffrin produced a theory, which they proposed that all information pass into the short-term memory first. Most of it is then lost or displaced by other information coming in. The output stage, where information is retrieved from storage. Most of the time, everyday memory only concerns things that we already know something about. With this in mind, even from the very beginning when psychologists started their studies, their experimental studies of the memory process had some barriers and weaknesses. However, this work was not totally useless, Ebbinghaus was able to identify several different forms of remembering. „« Recognition: a way of remembering. When we may not be able to recall something, but if it is presented to us we will know that it is what we were trying to remember. „« Recall: being able to bring the information we want to mind. Ebbinghaus also found two other ways in which we could recall information; „« Reintegration: when we have forgotten something, we are able to put it together by recalling everything associated with it, and find we are able to reconstruct a memory. „« Re-learning savings: when we have learned something once, it won't take us as long to learn it a second time. Strategies, which help us to remember, are called MNEMONICS, visual imagery and sentences. Many people remember the order of the colours of the rainbow by remembering the sentence 'Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vane'. The first letter of each word representing the colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. There are also the silly ones that people use to put on personal letters and cards like: HOLLAND; hope our love lasts and never dies, and CHIP; come home I'm pregnant, are to name only a few, there are many, many more of them. In order to understand how the memory system works, we need to look at some of the reasons why we lose information (why we forget things). „« Displacement: items that are currently in our STM are pushed aside to make room for new incoming items. „« Decay Theory: where the memory trace fades away with time so that it is no longer available. „« Interference Theory: where the memory traces are disrupted or obscured by other incoming information. „« Retrieval Failure: where the items stored in LTM cannot be accessed because suitable retrieval cues are not available. Cues are items of information, which help us to recall others; they lead us mentally to the item we want to remember. Most people however, find their memory is faulty when it comes to recalling. The problem is more than likely not an inherent one but could arise from a misunderstanding of how the mind works. Much of what we forget, we have never really taken in. this is mostly because we have not been concentrating. Many of us have considerable difficulty remembering names of the people we meet for instance. As a result of this we experience mild fear when meeting new people and will likely rehearse an introduction situation. This will cause us to avoid eye contact and give those people only a fleeting glance. As this behaviour is the opposite of what we need to recall, we tend to forget anything that is associated with fear. There are many reasons why we forget, and there have been several explanations put forward by psychologists as to why we forget the things we used to know. Some of them are: „« Amnesia - the loss of the ability to memorise information and/or recall information stored in the memory. Many people with amnesia have a memory gap that extends back for sometime from the onset of the illness. This condition is known as retrograde amnesia. The other type of amnesia is anterograde and this is where those with this form of amnesia are unable to store new information in the period following the onset of the illness. The resultant gap extends from the moment of onset to the time when LTM resumes, if at all. This memory gap is usually permanent. Amnesia through brain damage is an extreme form of forgetting, but in everyday life we all forget things too. When psychologists have tried to explain exactly why we forget things, they have come up with several explanations. Freud, (1901) believed we forgot things because we are motivated to forget things. If we didn't, they would remind us of the things that were deeply traumatic and emotional. As this situation would be threatening to the conscious mind it is repressed, resulting in the individual to 'forget' it and be unable to bring it to mind. Another way to forget is interference. This can be either, retroactive interference: when something we have learnt interferes with something we have learnt previously. Or proactive interference: when one thing we have learnt interferes with the next one. When we forget things in our STM, it is usually caused by displacement. This is when information that is currently circulating in our STM has not been sufficiently processed to be able to pass onto our LTM and is therefore pushed out/or displaced by new incoming information. Psychologists have found however, that in practice it has been difficult to isolate of displacement from decay. The decay theory is where the information is forgotten because of the passage of time, rather than because of the displacement memory trace. The psychologists believe that some sort of structural change happens in the brain when a memory is laid down. It is clear to the psychologists that STM is a fragile store from which information is easily and quickly lost. The precise mechanism for forgetting information in STM is unclear, but it seems more than likely to be due to interference, displacement and decay, which all in some way have a role to play in it. We know that the memories we have transferred to LTM are relatively stable and long term. However, in LTM it is retrieval failure and interference that account for much of the forgetting. „« Retrieval failure occurs because the correct retrieval cues are not available. „« Interference, there are two types of interference in LTM; retroactive - occurs when new information interferes with the old information. Proactive - when an old memory trace disrupts new information. There seems to be little doubt that interference can cause forgetting. Recalling can be impaired both from prior learning, proactive interference and from later learni8ng, retroactive interference. In both cases however, the greater the similarity being used the greater the interference. Many of us believe that our memory automatically starts to get worse as we get older, and a friend of mine says 'when we have children, and the more we have the worse our memory gets'. Harris and Sunderland (1981) compared subjects aged between 20 and 36 with retired people aged between 69 and 80. They found the younger subjects experienced much more memory failure than the older group‘KA First Course in Psychology, Nicky Hayes, 3rd Edition, Harrap Ltd, London, 1984, page 219. There are some types of ageing where memory loss does occur and only affects a very small minority of old people, and an even smaller minority of young people (it is rare in the younger people). It usually occurs as a result of brain damage through 'senile dementia' or 'Alzheimer's disease'. These people become confused and make their memories worse by trying really hard to remember things. It appears that displacement, trace decay and interference theories are all based on the assumption that material becomes lost and is no longer available for retrieval. These factors all have a role to play in forgetting. As some material is irretrievably lost from memory, it is also sometimes the case that we have that memory 'on the tip of our tongue'. Psychologists believe that forgetting occurs as a result of retrieval failure and that we can only retrieve with the aid of cues. Emotional factors also play an important part in determining what is remembered. According to Freud, repression is where we push unpleasant memories from conscious awareness. A situation where repressed memories are thought to occur, (in fact they do occur) is in the areas of child abuse, and where adults are abused. Whatever the age, if we deny it ever happened, then it never happened. Forgetting things happens for many reasons, mentally, emotionally and physically, whatever our age. Bibliography: An Introduction to Cognitive Psychology, Process and Disorders, David Groome, 1999 Psychology press Ltd, East Sussex. A First Course in Psychology,3rd Edition,1984, Nicky haynes, Harrap Ltd, London, UK. Psychology an Introduction, 3rd Edition,1998, Nicky Haynes and Sue Orrel, Addison Wesley Longman Ltd, Harrow, Essex. Psychology for AS Lvel, Mike Cardwell, Liz Clarke and Claire Meldrum,2001, Harper Collins Publishers Ltd, London, UK. Word Count: 1933
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