Cognition: Fundamentals and Applications

By Fouad Sabry

What Is Cognition

The "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses" is what we mean when we talk about cognition. It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes, including perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension of language and production of language. Cognitive processes make use of previously acquired knowledge while also uncovering fresh information.

How You Will Benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Cognition

Chapter 2: Cognitive science

Chapter 3: Cognitive psychology

Chapter 4: Attention

Chapter 5: Recall (memory)

Chapter 6: Animal cognition

Chapter 7: Metacognition

Chapter 8: Encoding (memory)

Chapter 9: Embodied cognition

Chapter 10: Neurodevelopmental framework for learning

(II) Answering the public top questions about cognition.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of cognition in many fields.

(IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technologies in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of cognition' technologies.

Who This Book Is For

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of cognition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jul 6, 2023

Book preview

Chapter 1: Cognition

The mental action or process of learning through experience, thought, and the senses is known as cognition. It includes all facets of cognitive abilities, including perception, focus, thought, imagination, intelligence, knowledge generation, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension, and language production. Cognitive processes both use and generate new knowledge.

Numerous disciplines, including linguistics, musicology, anesthesiology, neurology, psychiatry, psychology, education, philosophy, ethnography, biology, systemics, logic, and computer science, among others, study cognitive processes from various angles and in various settings. The emerging subject of cognitive science, an increasingly independent academic discipline, synthesizes these and other methods of cognition study (such as embodied cognition).

Cognition was first used to refer to thinking and consciousness in the fifteenth century.

Despite the fact that the term cognitive itself dates to the 15th century, Scientists like Wilhelm Wundt, Herman Ebbinghaus, Mary Whiton Calkins, and William James would contribute to the study of human cognition as psychology evolved as a flourishing field of study in Europe and America.

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) placed a strong emphasis on the idea of what he called introspection, or probing one's own inner feelings. In order for Wundt to find the information from introspection scientific, the subject had to be careful to explain their sensations in the most impartial way possible. Modern psychologists regard Wundt's approaches to be overly subjective and prefer to rely on more objective procedures of investigation to draw conclusions about the human cognitive process, despite the fact that Wundt's contributions are by no means minimal.

Cognitive research was done by Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), who focused on the capacity and operation of the human memory. Ebbinghaus created his own experiment in which he created almost 2,000 syllables from words that didn't exist (like EAS). He then assessed his own capacity for picking up these non-words. In order to account for the impact of prior experience on what the words might imply and make it easier for memory, he purposefully used non-words rather than actual words. His work had a significant impact on the investigation of serial position and how it affected memory (discussed further below).

American psychologist Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930) was a significant pioneer. She also studied how well people can remember things. The research she did led to a widely accepted idea known as the recency effect.

When referring to a person's psychological functions, the term cognition in psychology is typically employed within an information processing framework. The cognitive psychology of emotion is a topic of significant investigation today. Metacognition, or the awareness of one's own tactics and methods of cognition, is also a topic of extensive inquiry. Traditionally, emotion was not thought of as a cognitive activity. The growth of psychological studies has led to numerous changes of the idea of cognition.

Psychologists initially believed that information processing was how cognition controlled human behavior. After the Behaviorist movement began to see cognition as a type of behavior in the 1950s, a movement known as cognitivism emerged.

The creation of human cognition or mental processes has been the subject of studies on cognitive development by sociologists and psychologists for many years.

One of the most significant and influential figures in the subject of developmental psychology was Jean Piaget. He thought that because we are capable of abstract symbolic reasoning, humans are different from other animals. Lev Vygotsky, Sigmund Freud, and Erik Erikson, who made significant contributions to developmental psychology, might be compared to his work. After observing his own three children's intellectual growth and coming up with a theory of cognitive development that outlines the stages of childhood, Piaget is now known for his work on studying the cognitive development of children.

Serial position

The purpose of the serial position experiment is to test the primacy effect and recency effect, two theories of memory that claim that when information is presented serially, we tend to recall the information near the beginning of the sequence. As a result, information that is presented in the middle of the sequence is frequently lost or not as easily recalled. Because the most recent information is still in working memory when being asked to be recalled, this study predicts that the recency effect is stronger than the primacy effect. Even once information is learned, it still has to be retrieved. This study focuses on how memories work in people.

Word superiority

At the word superiority experiment, subjects are shown a word or a single letter for 40 milliseconds before being asked to recall the letter that was in the specific position in the word. Theoretically, when a letter is presented in a word rather than alone, the subject should be better able to remember it. The goal of this study is to examine human speech and language.

Brown–Peterson

In one variation of the Brown-Peterson experiment, after being briefly shown with a trigram, participants are then given a distractor task that asks them to determine if a string of words is indeed a word or not (due to being misspelled, etc.). They are asked to recall the trigram from before the distraction task after the distraction activity. Theoretically, participants will have a tougher time recalling the trigram accurately the longer the distractor activity lasts. The goal of this study is to examine human short-term memory.

Memory span

Each participant in the memory span experiment is shown a series of identical stimuli, including words that represent objects, numbers, letters with similar and distinct sounds, and letters. After receiving the stimuli, the individual is asked to recall the sequence of stimuli in the precise order that they were provided. In one variation of the experiment, if a list was successfully remembered by the individual, the list length for that sort of material was increased by one, and vice versa if it was poorly remembered. According to the notion, people can only recall seven different items at a time, including short words and letters with different sounds. With similar-sounding letters and lengthier words, the memory span is predicted to be lower.

Visual search

A subject is shown a window with circles and squares strewn about it in one variation of the visual search experiment. The participant's task is to determine whether the window has a green circle. A number of trial windows with blue squares or circles, one green circle, or no green circle at all are displayed to the subject in the featured search. In the conjunctive search, the participant is shown trial windows with blue circles or green squares and is asked to detect if a green circle is present or absent. It is anticipated that as the number of distractions grows, reaction time—the amount of time it takes a participant to decide whether a green circle is present or not—should remain constant. Conjunctive searches without the objective should require more time to react than conjunctive searches with the target. The idea is that when the target and the distractor colors differ, it is simple to identify the target in feature searches or to determine if it is absent. When the target is absent during conjunctive searches, reaction times lengthen because the subject must examine each shape to identify whether it is the target or not because some, if not all, of the distractor shapes have the same hue as the target stimulus. Conjunctive searches where the target is present take less time because the search between each shape ends once the target is located.

Knowledge representation

Numerous models have explored the semantic network of knowledge representation systems. The leveling and sharpening of stories when they are recited from memory, as examined by Bartlett, is one of the oldest paradigms. The semantic differential employed component analysis to identify the primary meanings of words and discovered that the first factor is the importance or goodness of the word. More regulated studies investigate how words relate to categories during free recall. In George Miller's Wordnet, the hierarchical structure of words has been formally mapped. With neural network studies based on computational techniques like latent semantic analysis (LSA), Bayesian analysis, and multidimensional component analysis, more dynamic models of semantic networks have been developed and tested. All branches of cognitive science research the semantics (meaning) of words.

Metacognition is the awareness of one's own cognitive patterns and their understanding. The word beyond or on top of in the original word meta is where the phrase originates. While a metacognitive model often seeks to include the observer in the model, scientific models are frequently prone to separating the observer from the object or topic of research.

An especially significant type of metacognition is called metamemory, which is described as knowledge of memory and mnemonic techniques.

There are at least two books by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) that discuss metacognition. The Parva Naturalia and the Soul.

Studies on the benefits of aerobic and anaerobic exercise for improving cognitive function.

Studies examining the effects of phytoestrogen, blueberry supplementation, and antioxidants revealed modest improvements in cognitive performance following supplementation but no appreciable differences from placebo.

It appears that improving cognition involves exposing people with cognitive impairment (such as dementia) to regular activities intended to promote thinking and memory in a social situation. The effect of social cognitive stimulation appears to be greater than the effects of various medication treatments, despite the fact that the study materials are modest and larger investigations are needed to corroborate the findings.

When compared to before treatment, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been demonstrated to improve cognition in people without dementia one month afterwards. The difference between the effect and placebo was not appreciably larger.

{End Chapter 1}

Chapter 2: Cognitive science

The fields of linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology all contribute to the multidisciplinary field of cognitive science, which is the scientific study of the mind and the activities that occur within it.

The study of cognitive science aims to comprehend and explicate the fundamentals of intelligence in the expectation that doing so would result in a deeper insight into both the workings of the mind and the process of education. The 1950s saw the beginning of an intellectual movement that came to be known as the cognitive revolution, which led to the development of the cognitive sciences.

In the 1950s, an intellectual movement that came to be known as the cognitive revolution laid the groundwork for what is now known as the cognitive sciences. Plato's Meno and Aristotle's De Anima are two examples of ancient Greek philosophical texts that can be used to trace the origins of cognitive science. Many modern philosophers, including Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Cabanis, Leibniz, and John Locke, rejected scholasticism despite the fact that most of them had never read Aristotle, and they were working with an entirely.

Early cyberneticists in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who attempted to comprehend the organizing principles of the mind are considered the forefathers of the present culture of cognitive science. This culture may be traced back to the early cyberneticists. McCulloch and Pitts constructed the earliest forms of what are now known as artificial neural networks, which are models of computation influenced by the structure of biological brain networks. McCulloch and Pitts' work is credited with laying the groundwork for the field of artificial neural networks.

The early development of the theory of computation and the digital computer in the 1940s and 1950s was another factor that contributed to the phenomenon.

Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann played an important part in the development of these ideas.

The contemporary computer system, or Von Neumann machine, would be of vital importance to the field of cognitive science, both in the sense that it is a metaphor for the mind, in addition to its use as a method of inquiry.

J.C.R. Licklider, who was working within the psychology department at the time and conducting experiments using computer memory as models for human cognition, is credited with being the first person to conduct cognitive science experiments at an academic institution.