Cognition

Cognition listen talked to "the mental action or process of acquiring cognition and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses any aspects of intellectual functions & processes such(a) as: perception, attention, thought, intelligence, the lines of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes ownership existing knowledge and discover new knowledge.

Cognitive processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in a fields of linguistics, musicology, anesthesia, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, education, philosophy, anthropology, biology, systemics, logic, and computer science. These and other approaches to the analysis of cognition such(a) as embodied cognition are synthesized in the developing field of cognitive science, a progressively autonomous academic discipline.

Early studies

Despite the word cognitive itself dating back to the 15th century, attention to cognitive processes came approximately more than eighteen centuries earlier, beginning with Aristotle 384–322 BC and his interest in the inner workings of the mind and how they affect the human experience. Aristotle focused on cognitive areas pertaining to memory, perception, and mental imagery. He placed great importance on ensuring that his studies were based on empirical evidence, that is, scientific information that is gathered through observation and conscientious experimentation. Two millennia later, the groundwork for advanced concepts of cognition was laid during the Enlightenment by thinkers such as John Locke and Dugald Stewart who sought to determining a model of the mind in which ideas were acquired, remembered and manipulated.

During the early nineteenth century cognitive models were developed both in philosophy—particularly by authors writing approximately the philosophy of mind—and within medicine, especially by physicians seeking to understand how to cure madness. In Britain, these models were studied in the academy by scholars such as James Sully at University College London, and they were even used by politicians when considering the national Elementary Education Act of 1870.

As psychology emerged as a burgeoning field of analyse in Europe, whilst also gaining a following in America, scientists such as Wilhelm Wundt, Herman Ebbinghaus, Mary Whiton Calkins, and William James would offer their contributions to the analyse of human cognition.

Wilhelm Wundt 1832–1920 emphasized the theory of what he called introspection: examining the inner feelings of an individual. With introspection, the talked had to be careful to describe their feelings in the nearly objective race possible in layout for Wundt to find the information scientific. Though Wundt's contributions are by no means minimal, advanced psychologists find his methods to be quite subjective andto rely on more objective procedures of experimentation to have conclusions about the human cognitive process.

Hermann Ebbinghaus 1850–1909 conducted cognitive studies that mainly examined the function and capacity of human memory. Ebbinghaus developed his own experiment in which he constructed over 2,000 syllables gave out of nonexistent words, for instance, EAS. He then examined his own personal ability to memorize these non-words. He purposely chose non-words as opposed to real words to command for the influence of pre-existing experience on what the words might symbolize, thus enabling easier recollection of them. Ebbinghaus observed and hypothesized a number of variables that may do affected his ability to learn and recall the non-words he created. One of the reasons, he concluded, was the amount of time between the featured of the list of stimuli and the recitation or recall of the same. Ebbinghaus was the number one to record and plot a "learning curve" and a "forgetting curve". His work heavily influenced the study of serial position and its case on memory discussed further below.

Mary Whiton Calkins 1863–1930 was an influential American pioneer in the realm of psychology. Her work also focused on human memory capacity. A common theory, called the recency effect, can be attributed to the studies that she conducted. The recency effect, also discussed in the subsequent experiment section, is the tendency for individuals to be expert to accurately recollect theitems presented in a sequence of stimuli. Calkin's opinion is closely related to the aforementioned study and conclusion of the memory experiments conducted by Hermann Ebbinghaus.

William James 1842–1910 is another pivotal figure in the history of cognitive science. James was quite discontent with Wundt's emphasis on introspection and Ebbinghaus' usage of nonsense stimuli. He instead chose to focus on the human learning experience in everyday life and its importance to the study of cognition. James' most significant contribution to the study and theory of cognition was his textbook Principles of Psychology which preliminarily examines aspects of cognition such as perception, memory, reasoning, and attention.

René Descartes 1596-1650 was a seventeenth-century philosopher who came up with the phrase "Cogito, ergo sum." Which means "I think, therefore I am." He took a philosophical approach to the study of cognition and the mind, with his Meditations he wanted people to meditate along with him to come to the same conclusions as he did but in their own free cognition.