Chapter 9. Cognition
Approximate reading time: 4 minutes
Cognition is defined as the processes of acquiring and using knowledge. For most of the early and mid-twentieth century, the dominant school of psychology was behaviourism. The near-mystical theories of Freud and Jung had soured more empirically-minded psychologists, who began to look for objective ways of studying the mind. This led to them focus only on observable phenomena, such as behaviour, and ignore mental constructs and thinking. This changed in the 1950s with the popularization of the digital computer (initiated by Alan Turing’s work) and criticisms of behaviourist theories of language acquisition (by Noam Chomsky). The cognitive approach became the most important school of psychology during the 1960s, and the field of psychology has been enormously influenced by this approach. Cognitive psychologists are interested not just in the content of our thoughts, but in the processes of thinking: reasoning, problem-solving, interpreting, imagining, and so on. The study of these mental processes, and how they relate to our feelings and behaviour, is the focus of cognitive psychology.
The cognitive school was greatly influenced by the development of the computer, and although the differences between computers and the human mind are vast, cognitive psychologists have used the computer as a model for understanding the workings of the mind.
Consider the differences between brains and computers:
| Computers | Brains |
|---|---|
| Information can be accessed only if one knows the exact location of the memory. | Information can be accessed through spreading activation from closely related concepts. |
| Most computers are primarily serial, meaning they finish one task before they start another. | Operate primarily in parallel, meaning that they are multitasking on many different actions at the same time. |
| Short-term, random-access memory is a subset of long-term, read-only memory. | The processes of short-term memory and long-term memory are distinct. |
| The mechanical aspects are different from the programs. | There is no difference between hardware and software. |
| Transistors are fast but less complex compared to neurons and their synapses. | Synapses, which operate using an electrochemical process, are much slower but also vastly more complex and useful. |
| Memory in the hard drive is differentiated from processing in the central processing unit. Existing memory is not used to interpret and store information. Retrieval does not modify stored memory. | There is no distinction between memory and processing. Existing memory is used to interpret and store incoming information, and retrieving information from memory changes the memory itself. |
| Cannot self-organise or self-repair. | Self-organising and self-repairing. |
| Fairly simple in its organisation compared to the brain. | Significantly bigger than any current computer. There are 25 million billion interactions among axons, dendrites, neurons, and neurotransmitters, and that doesn’t include the approximately 1 trillion glial cells that may also be important for information processing and memory. |
Although cognitive psychology began in earnest at about the same time that the electronic computer was first being developed, and cognitive psychologists have frequently used the computer as a model for understanding how the brain operates, research in cognitive neuroscience has revealed many important differences between brains and computers. For more on this, neuroscientist Chris Chatham (2007) wrote “10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers,” which you might want to check out along with the responses to it.
To calculate this time, we used a reading speed of 150 words per minute and then added extra time to account for images and videos. This is just to give you a rough idea of the length of the chapter section. How long it will take you to engage with this chapter will vary greatly depending on all sorts of things (the complexity of the content, your ability to focus, etc).
