HUMAN INFORMATION COGNITIVE THEORY

What is cognitive learning?

Not all cases of learning can easily be captured by classical and operant conditioning. Learning would be extremely inefficient if we had to rely completely on conditioning for all our learning. Human beings can learn efficiently by observation, taking instruction, and imitating the behavior of others.

"Cognitive learning is the result of listening, watching, touching or experiencing."

Cognitive learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge and skill by mental or cognitive processes — ;the procedures we have for manipulating information 'in our heads.' Cognitive processes include creating mental representations of physical objects and events, and other forms of information processing.

Cognitive learning is a powerful mechanism that provides the means of knowledge, and goes well beyond simple imitation of others. Conditioning can never explain what you are learning from reading our web-site. This learning illustrates the importance of cognitive learning.

How do we learn cognitively?

In cognitive learning, the individual learns by listening, watching, touching, reading, or experiencing and then processing and remembering the information. Cognitive learning might seem to be passive learning, because there is no motor movement. However, the learner is quite active, in a cognitive way, in processing and remembering newly incoming information. 
Cognitive learning enables us to create and transmit a complex culture that includes symbols, values, beliefs and norms. Because cognitive activity is involved in many aspects of human behavior, it might seem that cognitive learning only takes place in human beings. However, many different species of animals are capable of observational learning. For example, a monkey in the zoo sometimes imitates human visitors or other monkeys. Nevertheless, most information about cognitive learning is obtained from studies on human beings.

Information Processing theory:

theoretical perspective that focuses on the specific ways in which people mentally acquire, interpret and remember information and how such processes change over the course of development.

• Key ideas:
  • Input from the environment provides the raw material for learning and memory.
  • In addition to a sensory register, human memory includes two other storage mechanisms: working memory and long-term memory.
    • Working memory: component of memory that enables people to actively think about and process a small amount of information.
    • Long–term memory: component of memory that holds knowledge and skills for a relatively long period of time.
  • Attention is essential to the learning process.
  • A variety of cognitive processes are involved in moving information from working memory to long-term memory.
  • People control how they process information.
    • The central executive is the component of the human information processing system that oversees the flow of information throughout the system.
  • Cognitive development involves gradual changes in various components of the information processing system.

• Sensation and Perception
  • Most sensory and perceptual development occurs in infancy.
  • Some sensory and perceptual capabilities are present at birth. Other emerge within the first few weeks or months of life.
  • Infants show consistent preferences for certain types of stimuli, especially social ones.
  • Perceptual development is the result of both biological maturation and experience.
• Attention
  • Children’s attention is affected by stimulus characteristics and, later, also by familiarity.
  • With age, distractibility decreases and sustained attention increases.
  • Attention becomes increasingly purposeful.
    • Anticipation in infancy – for learning in preschoolers
• Working Memory and the Central Executive
  • These are largely responsible for what children pay attention to, how they think about the information, and how well they remember it.
  • Processing speed increases.
    • Children eventually develop automatization- process of becoming able to respond quickly and efficiently while mentally processing or physically performing certain tasks.
  • The capacity of working memory increases with age.
  • The central executive increasingly takes charge of cognitive processes.
• Long-Term Memory
  • The capacity to remember information in long-term memory appears very early and improves with age.
  • Children increasingly have conscious awareness of past events.
    • Children typically have little if any conscious recall of things that happened during their first two years- infantile amnesia
  • The amount of knowledge stored in long-term memory increases many times over.
  • Children’s knowledge about the world becomes increasingly integrated.
    • Children and adults alike sometimes organize their knowledge into schemas and scripts.
      • Schemas: tightly integrated set of ideas about a specific object or situation.
      • Script: schema that involves a predictable sequence of events related to a common activity.
    • Schemas and scripts increase in number and complexity as children grow older.
• Thinking and Reasoning
  • Thought increasingly makes use of symbols- mental entity that represents an external object or event, typically without reflecting its perceptual and behavioral qualities.
  • Logical thinking abilities improve with age.
  • Gestures sometimes foreshadow the emergence of more sophisticated thinking and reasoning.
• FOR THE TEACHER: Facilitating Basic Cognitive Processes
  • Provide a variety of sensory experiences for infants and young children.
  • Help children pay attention to things that are important for them to learn and remember.
  • Relate new information to children’s existing knowledge.
  • Remember that children can think about only a small amount of information at any one time.
  • When determining what children know or are ready to learn, consider not only what they say but also what they do.
  • Give children ongoing practice in using basic information and skills.

Metacognition and Cognitive Strategies

• Metacognition is knowledge and beliefs about one’s own cognitive processes, as well as efforts to regulate those cognitive processes to maximize learning and memory.
• Cognitive strategies are the specific mental processes that people intentionally use to acquire or manipulate information.
• Learning Strategies
  • Rehearsal
    • Attempt to learn and remember information by repeating it over and over.
  • Organization
    • Process of identifying interrelationships among pieces of information as a way of learning them more effectively.
  • Elaboration
    • Process of using prior knowledge to embellish on new information and thereby learn it more effectively.
• Problem Solving Strategies
  • By the time children are a year old, they have some ability to think about and solve problems. As they get older, their problem solving strategies become increasingly mental rather than behavioral.
  • From an information processing perspective, development of strategies is slow and increases in frequency and effectiveness over a lengthy period, up to months or years.
    • The rise and fall of strategies is similar to overlapping waves.
• Metacognitive Awareness
  • Metacognitive awareness is the extent to which one is able to reflect on the nature of one’s own thinking processes.
• Self-Regulated Learning
  • As children and adolescents gain awareness of their learning nf memory processes, they become more capable of self-regulated learning-directing and controlling one’s own cognitive processes in order to learn successfully.
    • Ex: setting learning goals, planning study time, motivating and persisting.
  • One especially important aspect of self-regulated learning iscomprehension monitoring- process of checking oneself to make sure one understands what is being studied.
• Epistemological Beliefs
  • Beliefs regarding the nature of knowledge and knowledge acquisition
• FOR THE TEACHER: Promoting Metacognitive and Strategic Development
  • Engage children in discussions about the mind.
  • Model and teach effective cognitive strategies.
  • Expect and encourage increasingly independent learning over time.
  • Provide opportunities for children to evaluate their own learning, and help them develop mechanisms for doing so effectively.
  • Promote more sophisticated epistemological beliefs.

Adding a Sociocultural Element to Information Processing Theory

• With the social nature of human beings in mind, some theorists have suggested that a combination of information processing and sociocultural perspectives provides a better explanation of how cognitive development occurs than either.
• Intersubjectivity
  • Awareness of shares perceptions and understandings that provide the foundation for social interaction.
    • Begins around 2 months of age
  • Joint attention
    • Phenomenon in which two people simultaneously focus on the same object or event, monitor each other’s attention, and coordinate their responses.
    • Around 9-10 months of age, intersubjectivity takes the form of joint attention.
  • Social referencing
    • Looking at someone else for clues about how to respond to a particular object or event.
    • Early in the second year.
• Enhancing Information Processing through Social Interaction
  • Regularly engage infants in social exchange.
  • Talk with children about their experiences.
  • Involve children and adolescents in joint activities that require new strategies.

Chidlren’s Construction of Theories

• Theory theory: theoretical perspective proposing that children construct increasingly integrated and complex understandings of physical and mental phenomena.
• Facilitating Children’s Theory Construction
  • Encourage and answer children’s why and how questions.
  • When teaching a new topic, determine what children already know and believe about it.
  • When children have misconceptions about a topic, work actively to help them acquire more accurate understandings.
    • Help youngsters undergo conceptual change– revision of one’s knowledge and understanding of a topic in response to new information about the topic.

Exceptionalities in Information Processing

• Learning Disabilities: significant deficit in one or more cognitive processes, to the point where special educational services are required.
• Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Disability characterized by inattention, by hyperactivity and impulse behavior, or by all of these characteristics.
• Working with children who have information processing difficulties:
  • Examine children’s work for clues about specific processing difficulties.
  • Help children keep their attention on the task at hand.
  • Teach strategies for controlling hyperactivity and impulsivity.
  • Provide extra scaffolding for studying, doing homework, and completing other learning tasks.
  • Teach social skills.

Sensory memory (STSS). Sensory memory is affiliated with the transduction of energy (change from one energy from to another). The environment makes available a variety of sources of information (light, sound, smell, heat, cold, etc.), but the brain only understands electrical energy. The body has special sensory receptor cells that transduce (change from one form of energy to another) this external energy to something the brain can understand. In the process of transduction, a memory is created. This memory is very short (less than 1/2 second for vision; about 3 seconds for hearing).
It is absolutely critical that the learner attend to the information at this initial stage in order to transfer it to the next one. There are two major concepts for getting information into STM:

First, individuals are more likely to pay attention to a stimulus if it has an interesting feature. We are more likely to get an orienting response if this is present.
Second, individuals are more likely to pay attention if the stimulus activates a known pattern. To the extent we have students call to mind relevant prior learning before we begin our presentations, we can take advantage of this principle.

Short-term memory (STM). Short-term memory is also called working memory and relates to what we are thinking about at any given moment in time. In Freudian terms, this is conscious memory. It is created by our paying attention to an external stimulus, an internal thought, or both. It will initially last somewhere around 15 to 20 seconds unless it is repeated (called maintenance rehearsal) at which point it may be available for up to 20 minutes. The hypothalamus is a brain structure thought to be involved in this shallow processing of information. The frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex is the structure associated with working memory. For example, you are processing the words you read on the screen in your frontal lobes. However, if I ask, "What is your telephone number?" your brain immediately calls that from long-term memory and replaces what was previously there.
Another major limit on information processing in STM is in terms of the number of units that can be processed an any one time. Miller (1956) gave the number as 7 + 2, but more recent research suggests the number may be more like 5 + 2 for most things we are trying to remember. Because of the variability in how much individuals can work with (for some it may be three, for others seven) it is necessary to point out important information. If some students can only process three units of information at a time, let us make certain it is the most important three.
There are two major concepts for retaining information in STM: organization and repetition. There are four major types of organization that are most often used in instructional design:

• Component (part/whole)--classification by category or concept (e.g., the components of the teaching/learning model);
• Sequential -- chronological; cause/effect; building to climax (e.g., baking a cake, reporting on a research study);
• Relevance -- central unifying idea or criteria (e.g., most important principles of learning for boys and girls, appropriate management strategies for middle school and high school students);
• Transitional (connective) -- relational words or phrases used to indicate qualitative change over time (e.g., stages in Piaget's theory of cognitive development or Erikson's stages of socioemotional development)

A related issue to organization is the concept of chunking or grouping pieces of data into units. For example, the letters "b d e" constitute three units of information while the word "bed" represents one unit even though it is composed of the same number of letters. Chunking is a major technique for getting and keeping information in short-term memory; it is also a type of elaboration that will help get information into long-term memory.
Repetition or rote rehearsal is a technique we all use to try to "learn" something. However, in order to be effective this must be done after forgetting begins. Researchers advise that the learner should not repeat immediately the content (or skill), but wait a few minutes and then repeat. For the most part, simply memorizing something does not lead to learning (i.e., relatively permanent change). We all have anecdotal evidence that we can remember something we memorized (a poem for example), but just think about all the material we tried to learn this way and the little we are able to remember after six months or a year.

Long-term memory (LTM). Long-term memory is also called preconscious and unconscious memory in Freudian terms. Preconscious means that the information is relatively easily recalled (although it may take several minutes or even hours) while unconscious refers to data that is not available during normal consciousness. It is preconscious memory that is the focus of cognitive psychology as it relates to long-term memory. The levels-of-processing theory, however, has provided some research that attests to the fact that we "know" more than we can easily recall. The two processes most likely to move information into long-term memory are elaboration and distributed practice (referred to as periodic review in thedirect instruction model).

There are several examples of elaboration that are commonly used in the teaching/learning process:

• imaging -- creating a mental picture;
• method of loci (locations)--ideas or things to be remembered are connected to objects located in a familiar location;
• pegword method (number, rhyming schemes)--ideas or things to be remembered are connected to specific words (e.g., one-bun, two-shoe, three-tree, etc.)
• Rhyming (songs, phrases)--information to be remembered is arranged in a rhyme (e.g., 30 days hath September, April, June, and November, etc.)
• Initial letter--the first letter of each word in a list is used to make a sentence (the sillier, the better).

USING THE INFORMATION PROCESSING APPROACH IN THE CLASSROOM
Principle	Example
1. Gain the students' attention.	Use cues to signal when you are ready to begin. Move around the room and use voice inflections.
2. Bring to mind relevant prior learning.	Review previous day's lesson. Have a discussion about previously covered content.
3. Point out important information.	Provide handouts. Write on the board or use transparencies.
4. Present information in an organized manner.	Show a logical sequence to concepts and skills. Go from simple to complex when presenting new material.
5. Show students how to categorize (chunk) related information.	Present information in categories. Teach inductive reasoning.
6. Provide opportunities for students to elaborate on new information.	Connect new information to something already known. Look for similarities and differences among concepts.
7. Show students how to use coding when memorizing lists.	Make up silly sentence with first letter of each word in the list. Use mental imagery techniques such as the keyword method.
8. Provide for repetition of learning.	State important principles several times in different ways during presentation of information (STM). Have items on each day's lesson from previous lesson (LTM). Schedule periodic reviews of previously learned concepts and skills (LTM).
9. Provide opportunities for overlearning of fundamental concepts and skills.	Use daily drills for arithmetic facts. Play form of trivial pursuit with content related to class.

References:

http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/cognition/infoproc.html
https://kkchilddevelopment.wordpress.com/child-development-2/cognitive-development-2/

http://etec51264b2010cip.pbworks.com/w/page/30354214/Conceptual%20Overview%20of%20Cognitive%20Theories