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An assignment on
Cognitive Concept
10 August 2017
SUBMITTED BY:
Abish Dahal
Fourth semester
Nepal Business College
Biratnagar 15, Nepal

Author Note
This research paper was prepared for Psychology , BBA 3763, and Department of
Psychology, Taught by Samir Singh Sudhansu
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Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as "attention, language

use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and thinking". Much of the work
derived from cognitive psychology has been integrated into various other modern disciplines
of psychological study, including educational psychology, social psychology, personality
psychology, abnormal psychology, developmental psychology, and economics. Cognition is
"the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought,
experience, and the senses. It encompasses processes such as knowledge, attention, memory
and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and "computation problem solving
and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Human cognition is
conscious and unconscious, concrete or abstract, as well as intuitive (like knowledge of a
language) and conceptual (like a model of a language). Cognitive processes use existing
knowledge and generate new knowledge.

Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that focuses on the way people process
information. It looks at how we process information we receive and how the treatment of this
information leads to our responses. In other words, cognitive psychology is interested in what
is happening within our minds that links stimulus(input) and response (output). Cognitive
psychologists study internal processes that include perception, attention, language, memory,
and thinking. It includes the following areas;

Perception

Learning

Memory

Personality

Intelligence

Problem Solving

Attention

Thinking
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Perception

Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in

order to represent and understand the environment. All perception involves signals in
the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sense
organs. For example, vision involves light striking the retina of the eye, smell is mediated
by odor molecules, and hearing involves pressure waves. Perception is not the passive receipt
of these signals, but is shaped by learning, memory, expectation, and attention.

Perception can be split into two processes. Firstly, processing sensory input, which
transforms these low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for
object recognition). Secondly, processing which is connected with a person's concepts and
expectations (knowledge) and selective mechanisms (attention) that influence perception.
Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems
mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness.

Learning

Organizational learning is the process of creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge

within an organization. An organization improves over time as it gains experience. From this
experience, it is able to create knowledge. This knowledge is broad, covering any topic that
could better an organization. Examples may include ways to increase production efficiency or
to develop beneficial investor relations. Knowledge is created at four different units:
individual, group, organizational, and inter organizational.

Memory

Memory is the term given to the structures and processes involved in the storage and
subsequent retrieval of information. Memory is essential to all our lives. Without a memory
of the past we cannot operate in the present or think about the future. We would not be able to
remember what we did yesterday, what we have done today or what we plan to do tomorrow.
Without memory we could not learn anything. Memory is involved in processing vast
amounts of information. This information takes many different forms, e.g. images, sounds or
meaning. For psychologists the term memory covers three important aspects of information
processing:

Problem solving
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The term problem solving is used in many disciplines, sometimes with different perspectives,
and often with different terminologies. For instance, it is a mental process in psychology and
a computerized process in computer science. Problems can also be classified into two
different types (ill-defined and well-defined) from which appropriate solutions are to be
made. Ill-defined problems are those that do not have clear goals, solution paths, or expected
solution. Well-defined problems have specific goals, clearly defined solution paths, and clear
expected solutions.

Problem solving refers to cognitive processing directed at achieving a goal when the problem
solver does not initially know a solution method. A problem exists when someone has a goal
but does not know how to achieve it. Problems can be classified as routine or nonroutine, and
as well defined or ill defined. The major cognitive processes in problem solving are
representing, planning, executing, and monitoring. The major kinds of knowledge required
for problem solving are facts, concepts, procedures, strategies, and beliefs. Classic theoretical
approaches to the study of problem solving are associationism, Gestalt, and information
processing. Current issues and suggested future issues include decision making, intelligence
and creativity, teaching of thinking skills, expert problem solving, analogical reasoning,
mathematical and scientific thinking, everyday thinking, and the cognitive neuroscience of
problem solving.

Intelligence

Human intelligence, mental quality that consists of the abilitiesto learn from experience,
adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to
manipulate one's environment. Overview of human intelligence, including a discussion of
intelligence tests.

The theories are grouped into four major theory types: (1) psychometric theories; (2)
cognitive theories; (3) cognitive-contextual theories; and (4) biological theories.
Psychometric theories derive from studying individual differences in test performance on
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cognitive tests. Questions about the structure of human intelligence, including the importance
of general intelligence, have dominated the psychometric theories.

Thinking

Thinking can refer to the act of producing thoughts or the process of producing thoughts. In
spite of the fact that thought is a fundamental human activity familiar to everyone, there is no
generally accepted agreement as to what thought is or how it is created. Because thought
underlies many human actions and interactions, understanding its physical and metaphysical
origins, processes, and effects has been a longstanding goal of many academic disciplines
including artificial intelligence, biology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Thinking
allows humans to make sense of, interpret, represent or model the world they experience, and
to make predictions about that world. It is therefore helpful to an organism with needs,
objectives, and desires as it makes plans or otherwise attempts to accomplish those goals.

Attention

Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive
neuroscience Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one thing
while ignoring other things. Examples include listening carefully to what someone is saying
while ignoring other conversations in the room. Attention can also be split, as when a person
drives a car and talks on a cell phone at the same time.

. Of the many cognitive processes associated with the human mind (decision-
making, memory, emotion, etc), attention is considered the most concrete because it is tied so
closely to perception. As such, it is a gateway to the rest of cognition. The most famous
definition of attention was provided by one of the first major psychologists, William James:

Language

Language is a system of symbols and rules that is used for meaningful communication. A
system of communication has to meet certain criteria in order to be considered a language:
A language uses symbols, which are sounds, gestures, or written characters that represent
objects, actions, events, and ideas. Symbols enable people to refer to objects that are in
another place or events that occurred at a different time. A language is meaningful and
therefore can be understood by other users of that language. A language is generative, which
means that the symbols of a language can be combined to produce an infinite number of
messages.
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A language has rules that govern how symbols can be arranged. These rules allow people to
understand messages in that language even if they have never encountered those messages
before.

Conclusion

. Cognition helps for creating attention to the world around us, memories of past events,
understanding of language, judgments about how the world works, and abilities to solve
problems all contribute to how we behave and interact with our surrounding environment.