COGNITIVE THEORY OF LEARNING

Cognitive Theory of Learning

Cognitive Theory of Learning

Introduction

Cognitive theory is a learning theory of psychology that attempts to explain human behavior by understanding the thought processes. The assumption is that humans are logical beings that make the choices that make the most sense to them. “Information processing” is a commonly used description of the mental process, comparing the human mind to a computer.

Pure cognitive theory largely rejects behaviorism on the basis that behaviorism reduces complex human behavior to simple cause and effect. However, the trend in past decades has been towards merging the two into a comprehensive cognitive-behavioral theory. This allows therapists to use techniques from both schools of thought to help clients achieve their goals (Coffield, Moseley, Hall and Ecclestone, 2004).

HUMAN ACTIVITY IN COGNITION

At first, cognitive psychologists understood man as a passive organism that mechanically processes external impulses. Later they questioned this assumption. It is possible for example to describe in experiment how expectation influences human perception and memory. Information processing "upwards" is directly regulated by outside impulses, whereas processing "downwards" is regulated by what the individual brings into the situation (e.g., expectation influences through context and past experience). An example of "downward" processing is that if the word "well" is not printed in bold, it is easier to read in the sentence "I hope you are ..." than as a single word. Cognitive processes often include the intersection of both processes (Delahoussaye, 2002).

The cognitive approach can also be appropriately applied to traditional fields of psychology. Developmental psychology, for example, is interested in how cognitive processes change with age (whether they decrease or increase in quality). We can also ask how the cognitive images of the world around us develop in childhood and how they are related to a child's behavior and abilities. Even J. Piaget (1970), one of the founders of developmental psychology, refers to the basic principles of cognitive psychology. From the information processing perspective, social psychology assesses topics such as social interaction, forming of attitudes and a system of beliefs, to name but a few.

PROBLEM SOLVING

A dominant area of research in cognitive psychology, in the tradition of Gestalt psychology, is problem solving. Researchers such as J.G. Greeno (1997) studied how respondents solve problems on a continuum between poorly and well-defined problems. Respondents confronted with poorly and well-defined problems used several strategies. Algorithm is a methodical approach, analyzing the exact set of rules that summarize the possible problem characteristics. This process is quite arduous, despite its high precision. A faster but less accurate approach is the heuristic one, based on the similarity of tasks. Heuristics rely on short segments derived from experience. Replacing speed with accuracy is not always the best strategy for solving problems and therefore the study of problem solving and decision-making expanded from the human context into that of artificial intelligence (AI) (Bostrom and Lassen, 2006).

AI is a research area of cognitive science with strong links to the computer metaphor. Among other objectives, AI researchers focused on the degree to which computer ...