Anda di halaman 1dari 14

Cognitive

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed (in faculties such as perception, language, memory, reasoning, and emotion), represented, and transformed in behaviour, (human or other animal) nervous system or machine (e.g., computer). Cognitive science consists of multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education. It spans many levels of analysis, from low-level learning and decision mechanisms to high-level logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. The term cognitive science was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report, which concerned the then-current state of Artificial Intelligence research. In the same decade, the journal Cognitive Science and the Cognitive Science Society were founded. In 1982, Vassar College became the first institution in the world to grant an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science.

History
Cognitive science has a pre-history traceable back to ancient Greek philosophical texts (see Plato's Meno); and certainly must include writers such as Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Cabanis, Leibniz and John Locke. But, although these early writers contributed greatly to the philosophical discovery of mind and this would ultimately lead to the development of psychology, they were working with an entirely different set of tools and core concepts than those of the cognitive scientist. The modern culture of cognitive science can be traced back to the early cyberneticists in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who sought to understand the organizing principles of the mind. McCulloch and Pitts developed the first variants of what are now known as artificial neural networks, models of computation inspired by the structure of biological neural networks. Another precursor was the early development of the theory of computation and the digital computer in the 1940s and 1950s. Alan Turing and John von Neumann were instrumental in these developments. The modern computer, or Von Neumann machine, would play a central role in cognitive science, both as a metaphor for the mind, and as a tool for investigation. In 1959, Noam Chomsky published a scathing review of B. F. Skinner's book Verbal Behavior. At the time, Skinner's behaviorist paradigm dominated psychology: Most psychologists focused on functional relations between stimulus and response, without positing internal representations. Chomsky argued that in order to explain language, we needed a theory like generative grammar, which not only attributed internal representations but characterized their underlying order.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, much cognitive science research focused on the possibility of artificial intelligence. Researchers such as Marvin Minsky would write computer programs in languages such as LISP to attempt to formally characterize the steps that human beings went through, for instance, in making decisions and solving problems, in the hope of better understanding human thought, and also in the hope of creating artificial minds. This approach is known as "symbolic AI". Eventually the limits of the symbolic AI research program became apparent. For instance, it seemed to be unrealistic to comprehensively list human knowledge in a form usable by a symbolic computer program. The late 80s and 90s saw the rise of neural networks and connectionism as a research paradigm. Under this point of view, often attributed to James McClelland and David Rumelhart, the mind could be characterized as a set of complex associations, represented as a layered network. Critics argue that there are some phenomena which are better captured by symbolic models, and that connectionist models are often so complex as to have little explanatory power. Recently symbolic and connectionist models have been combined, making it possible to take advantage of both forms of explanation.

Principles
Levels of analysis A central tenet of cognitive science is that a complete understanding of the mind/brain cannot be attained by studying only a single level. An example would be the problem of remembering a phone number and recalling it later. One approach to understanding this process would be to study behavior through direct observation. A person could be presented with a phone number, asked to recall it after some delay. Then the accuracy of the response could be measured. Another approach would be to study the firings of individual neurons while a person is trying to remember the phone number. Neither of these experiments on their own would fully explain how the process of remembering a phone number works. Even if the technology to map out every neuron in the brain in real-time were available, and it were known when each neuron was firing, it would still be impossible to know how a particular firing of neurons translates into the observed behavior. Thus an understanding of how these two levels relate to each other is needed. This can be provided by a functional level account of the process. Studying a particular phenomenon from multiple levels creates a better understanding of the processes that occur in the brain to give rise to a particular behavior. Marr[6] gave a famous description of three levels of analysis: 1. the computational theory, specifying the goals of the computation; 2. representation and algorithm, giving a representation of the input and output and the algorithm which transforms one into the other; and 3. the hardware implementation, how algorithm and representation may be physically realized.

Interdisciplinary nature
Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field with contributors from various fields, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of mind, computer science, anthropology, sociology, and biology. Cognitive science tends to view the world outside the mind much as other sciences do. Thus it too has an objective, observer-independent existence. The field is usually seen as compatible with the physical sciences, and uses the scientific method as well as simulation or modeling, often comparing the output of models with aspects of human behavior. Some doubt whether there is a unified cognitive science and prefer to speak of the cognitive sciences in plural. Many, but not all, who consider themselves cognitive scientists have a functionalist view of the mindthe view that mental states are classified functionally, such that any system that performs the proper function for some mental state is considered to be in that mental state. According to some versions of functionalism, even non-human systems, such as other animal species, alien life forms, or advanced computers can, in principle, have mental states.

Cognitive science: the term


The term "cognitive" in "cognitive science" is "used for any kind of mental operation or structure that can be studied in precise terms" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). This conceptualization is very broad, and should not be confused with how "cognitive" is used in some traditions of analytic philosophy, where "cognitive" has to do only with formal rules and truth conditional semantics. The earliest entries for the word "cognitive" in the OED take it to mean roughly pertaining "to the action or process of knowing". The first entry, from 1586, shows the word was at one time used in the context of discussions of Platonic theories of knowledge. Most in cognitive science, however, presumably do not believe their field is the study of anything as certain as the knowledge sought by Plato.

Scope
Cognitive science is a large field, and covers a wide array of topics on cognition. However, it should be recognized that cognitive science is not equally concerned with every topic that might bear on the nature and operation of the mind or intelligence. Social and cultural factors, emotion, consciousness, animal cognition, comparative and evolutionary approaches are frequently de-emphasized or excluded outright, often based on key philosophical conflicts. Another important mind-related subject that the cognitive sciences tend to avoid is the existence of qualia, with discussions over this issue being sometimes limited to only mentioning qualia as a philosophically-open matter. Some within the cognitive science community, however, consider these to be vital topics, and advocate the importance of investigating them. Below are some of the main topics that cognitive science is concerned with. This is not an exhaustive list, but is meant to cover the wide range of intelligent behaviors. See List of cognitive science topics for a list of various aspects of the field. As a huge array of small but individually feeble elements (i.e. neurons), or as a collection of higher-level structures such as symbols, schemas, plans, and rules. The former view uses connectionism to study the mind, whereas the latter emphasizes symbolic computations. One way to view the issue is whether it is possible to accurately simulate a human brain on a computer without accurately simulating the neurons that make up the human brain.

Knowledge, and Processing, of Language

A well known example of a Phrase structure tree. This is one way of representing human language that shows how different components are organized hierarchically. Main articles: Theoretical linguistics, Cognitive linguistics, Language, Linguistics, and Psycholinguistics The ability to learn and understand language is an extremely complex process. Language is acquired within the first few years of life, and all humans under normal circumstances are able to acquire language proficiently. A major driving force in the theoretical linguistic field is discovering the nature that language must have in the abstract in order to be learned in such a fashion. Some of the driving research questions in studying how the brain itself processes language include: (1) To what extent is linguistic knowledge innate or learned?, (2) Why is it more difficult for adults to acquire a second-language than it is for infants to acquire their first-language?, and (3) How are humans able to understand novel sentences? The study of language processing ranges from the investigation of the sound patterns of speech to the meaning of words and whole sentences. Linguistics often divides language processing into orthography, phonology and phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Many aspects of language can be studied from each of these components and from their interaction. The study of language processing in cognitive science is closely tied to the field of linguistics. Linguistics was traditionally studied as a part of the humanities, including studies of history, art and literature. In the last fifty years or so, more and more researchers have studied knowledge and use of language as a cognitive phenomenon, the main problems being how knowledge of language can be acquired and used, and what precisely it consists of. Linguists have found that, while humans form sentences in ways apparently governed by very complex systems, they are remarkably unaware of the rules that govern their own speech. Thus linguists must resort to indirect methods to determine what those rules might be, if indeed rules as such exist. In any event, if speech is indeed governed by rules, they appear to be opaque to any conscious consideration.

Cognitive Learning Theory


Since the 1960's cognitivism has provided the predominant perspective within which Learning Research has been conducted and theories of learning have evolved. History of and assumptions of cognitivism: Edward Tolman proposed a theory that had a cognitive flair. He was a behaviorist but valued internal mental phenomena in his explanations of how learning occurs. Some of his central ideas were: Behavior should be studied at a local level. Learning can occur without reinforcement. Learning can occur without a change in behavior. Intervening variables must be considered. Behavior is purposive. Expectations of fact behavior. Learning results in an organized body of information. Based on his research of rats, Tolman proposed that rats and other organisms develop cognitive maps of their environments. They learn where different parts of the environment are situated in relation to one another. The concept of a cognitive map also called a mental map has continued to be a focus of research. Gestalt psychology: Gestalt psychologist emphasized the importance of organizational processes of perception, learning, and problem solving. They believed that individuals were predisposed to organize information in particular ways. The basic ideas of Gestalt psychology are: 1. Perception is often different from reality. This includes optical illusions. 2. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. They believed that human experience cannot be explained unless the overall experience is examined instead of individual parts of experience. 3. The organism structures and organizes experience. The German word Gestalt means "structured whole." This means an organism structures experience even though structure might not be necessarily inherent.

4. The organism is predisposed to organize experience in particular ways. For example, the law of proximity is that people tend to perceive as a unit those things that are close together in space. Second example: similar people tend to perceive as a unit those things that are similar to one another. Problem-solving involves restructuring and insight. It was proposed that problemsolving involves mentally combining and re-combining the various elements of a problem until a structure that solves the problem is achieved. Piaget's developmental theory Besides psychology, Piaget was interested in epistemology. Piaget used something he called the clinical method. This was research in which he gave children a series of tasks or problems, asking questions about each one. He then tailored his interviews to the particular responses that each child gave. His follow-up questions varied from child to child. This methodology was very different from the methods of contemporary behaviorist research. Piaget's ideas about human learning: People are active processors of information. Instead of being passive respondents to environmental conditions, human beings are actively involved and interpreting and learning from the events around them. Knowledge can be described in terms of structures that change with development. Piaget proposed the concept of schema. As children develop, new schemes emerge, and are sometimes integrated with each other into cognitive structures. Cognitive development results from the interactions that children have with their physical and social environments. As a child explores his world, and eventually they began to discover that they hold a perspective of the world uniquely their own. The process through which people interact with the environment remains constant. According to Piaget, people interact with their environment through to unchanging processes known as assimilation and accommodation. In accommodation, an individual either modifies an existing scheme or forms a new one to account for the new event. In assimilation an individual interacts with an object or event in a way that is consistent with an existing scheme. People are intrinsically motivated to try to make sense of the world around them. According to this view, people are sometimes in the state of equilibrium, they can comfortably explain new events in terms of their existing schemes. However at times they can encounter events they cannot explain our make sense of this is called disequilibrium, a mental discomfort. Through reorganizing thought people are able to then understand the previously un-understandable and return to equilibrium. Cognitive development occurs in distinct stages, with thought processes at each stage being qualitatively different from those and other stages.

Piaget's four stages: Sensorimotor stage: Preoperational stage: Concrete Operations: Formal Operations: Sensorimotor stage: from birth until about two years of age. At this age children are only aware of objects that are directly before them, thus the saying, "out of sight, out of mind." (Example: The game of "peek-a-boo" is enjoyed only by infants. Their joy in this game comes from their "finding" the adult -- who"hides" by blocking the child's view and thus "disappears" and "re-appears" as the child experiences it.) Preoperational stage: emerges when children are about two years old until they are about six to seven years old. This is the stage of language development. Expanding childrens vocabularies reflect the many new mental schemes that are developing. This stage is characterized by a logical thinking, but not according toadult standards. A classic example is how young children cannot understand conservation of liquid. They will usually think that a taller glass has more water than a short glass even though both have been demonstrated to have the exact same amount of water. Concrete operations: this third stage of cognitive development appears when children are six or seven years old and continues until they are about 11 or 12 years old. Children begin to think logically about conservation problems and other situations as well. However, they typically can apply their logical operations only to concrete, observable objects and events. Formal operations: the fourth and final stage usually appears after children are 11 or 12 years of age and continues to evolve for several years after that time. During this time the child develops the ability to reason with abstract, hypothetical, and contraryto-fact information. Vygotsky's developmental theory: This Russian psychologist conducted numerous studies of children's thinking. Some of his most influential ideas are: 1. Complex mental processes began as social activities. As children develop, they gradually analyze these processes and can use them independently of those around him. Vygotsky called this process of social activities being internalized as mental activities "internalization." 2. Children can often accomplish more difficult tasks when they have the assistance of other people more advanced and competent than themselves. 3. Tasks within the zone of proximal development promote maximum cognitive growth. This is the zone of learning for a child where he can learn something with the assistance of others. Without such assistance he would not be able to learn the subject.

4. The idea of scaffolding learning comes from Vygotsky's zone of proximal development theory. Scaffolding refers to learning situations in which adults and other more competent individuals provide some form of guidance or structure that enables students to engage in learning activities within their zone of proximal development. Verbal Learning Research Verbal learning research is another area that has affected cognitive theory. Verbal learning research studied serial learning and paired social learning. Serial learning is characterized by a particular pattern. People usually learn the first few items and the last few items first of a list (i.e., they are more likely to forget items from the middle of the list than the beginning or the end). Overlearning is learning something to the level of mastery and then practicing additionally. Overlearned material is more easily recalled at a later time. Distributed practice is easily more effective than massed practice. This is the idea of spreading study out over time instead of into one long cram session. Learning in one situation often affects learning and recall in a later situation. The characteristics of the material affect the speed with which people can learned it. For example, items aremore quickly learned when they are meaningful, pronounceable, concrete rather than abstract, or able to be mentally visualized. People often impose meaning when learning new information. People organize what they learn. People often use coding strategies to help them learn. (Examples: mnemonics -- like the strategy of remembering "HOMES" as a mnemonic for the names of the Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior; or a rhyme, like "In 1492, Columbus sailded the ocean blue" to remember that date) People are more likely to learn general ideas than to learn words verbatim. Introduction to Contemporary Cognitivism General assumptions of cognitive theories: 1. Some learning processes may be unique to human beings. (Example, complex language.) 2. Cognitive processes are the focus of study. Mental events are central to human learning and they must therefore be incorporated into theories of learning. 3. The objective, systematic observations of peoples' behavior should be the focus of scientific inquiry; however, inferences about unobservable mental process can often be drawn from such study.

4. Individuals are actively involved in the learning process. They are not passive receivers of environmental conditions, they are active participants in that learning process. In fact, they can control their own learning. 5. Learning involves the formation of mental associations that are not necessarily reflected in overt behavior changes. This is very contrary to the behaviorist position, where no learning can happen without an external behavior change. This is contrasted with behavioral objectives. 6. Knowledge is organized. An individual's knowledge is self organized through various mental associations and structure. 7. Learning is a process of relating new information to previously learned information. Learning is most likely to occur when an individual can associate new learning with previous knowledge. Information Processing Theory This theory focuses on how people process the information they receive from the environment; how they perceive the stimuli around them, how they put what they've perceived into their memories, and how they find what they have learned when they need to use the knowledge. Constructivism: In the last 30 years, it has become apparent that people don't just receive information at face value. Instead, learners do a great deal with the information they acquire, theyt actively organize and try to make sense of it. This is often done in a unique and special way. Most cognitive theories now show learning as a construction of knowledge rather than just a reception or absorption of knowledge from the surrounding world. Contextual views: Several cognitive theories have emerged that place considerable emphasis on the importance of the immediate environment (i.e., the context) in learning and behavior. This view includes the zone of proximal development. Contextual use of learning has many labels, such as situated learning, situated cognition, and distributed intelligence. Distributed intelligence is shown when we think about and discuss ideas with others and think more intelligently than when we think alone.

General educational implications of cognitive theories: 1. Cognitive processes influence learning. 2. Learning difficulties often indicate ineffective or inappropriate cognitive processes, especially for children with learning disabilities, who tend to process information less effectively. Therefore, teachers need to be aware that all students are trying to learn something, as well as what they are trying to learn. 3. As children grow, they become capable of increasingly more sophisticated thought. 4. People organize the things they learn. Therefore, teachers can facilitate students' learning by presenting information in an organized manner. This organization should reflect students' previous knowledge and show how one thing relates to the other (i.e., helping students understand and make connections). 5. New information is most easily acquired when people can associate it with things they have already learned. Teachers should then show how new ideas relate to previous learning. 6. People control their own learning. Ultimately students, not their teachers, determine what things will be learned and how they will be learned.

Summary:
Cognitivism is currently the predominant perspective within which human learning is described and explained. Contemporary cognitivism emphasizes mental processes and proposes that many aspects of learning may be unique to the human species. Cognitivism has affected educational theory by emphasizing the role of the teacher in terms of the instructor's effectiveness of presentation of instructional material in a manner that facilitates students' learning (e.g., helping students to review and connect previous learning on a topic before moving to new ideas about that topic, helping students understand the material by organizing it effectively, understanding differences in students' learning styles, etc.)

References
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_science 2. Thagard, Paul (2nd, 2005). Mind : Introduction to Cognitive Science . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 3. Isac, Daniela; Charles Reiss (2008). I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science . Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199534203 . http://linguistics.concordia.ca/i-language/ 4. http://teachnet.edb.utexas.edu/~Lynda_abbot/Cognitive.html 5. Ormrod, J.E. (1999). Human learning (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: PrenticeHall.

Anda mungkin juga menyukai