COGNITIVE INFORMATION PROCESSING THEORY
REFLECTIONS ON COGNITIVE INFORMATION PROCESSING THEORY
With the emergence of technological devices and tools such as television, the
telephone, computers and their increasingly widespread use in social life, the 1950s witnessed the
psychologists’ tough work on categorizing the way the human brain works as a similar tool to
computer processing system which was a highly popular analogy at that time. This is claimed
by many to be an effort by cognitive psychologists to keep up with the changing and rising
technology trend of the decade. Cognitive scientists believed that the human brain was
marvelously efficient in solving problems and thinking critically. They, hence, put forward
the theory of Information Processing Model that included three prominent functions such as
sensory memory that assists people to get the information around via bodily senses, working
memory that supports people in managing and storing a huge amount of information through
mental work, and long-term memory that acts like storage providing all-time access to
information in a practical and ready-to-use way.
What interests me most as an enthusiastic instructor is that cognitive information
theory can be utilized in learning and teaching settings to yield better results in the acquisition
and behavioral change. To actualize this, a number of skills play a role in the process which
are focusing (concentration) skills, information gathering (collection) skills, remembering
(knowing) skills and lastly organizing (categorization) skills. Beyond their assistance to
instructors to designing learning environments, all these can aid learners themselves
understand a situation and decide how to act appropriately, collect information on and around
this situation and clarify it more thoroughly, encode and retrieve information when necessary,
and compare, organize, sequence all representations of the information input taken in the
previous steps. Such skills will also serve learners as metacognition skills that have been
extremely vital to humankind to survive all through his/her real-life scenarios.
In this essay, I’ve attempted to clarify the analogy between the human brain and
computers established by cognitive scientists and touch upon the very basic structure of how
the system works in the brain. Besides, the contributions of cognitive information processing
theory to instruction and learning were mentioned. There is no doubt that this theory is a
crucial one in the history of psychology studies regarding learning. Particularly when
compared to the previous theories of learning such as radical behaviorism, the cognitive theory is
well-grounded, properly-explained and meaningfully-structured. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t bear a number of pitfalls. First of these theoretical shortcomings is that cognitive
scientists claim that just like a computer processor, the human brain is also isolated from the
effects of the context it is in. To be more clear, a child in a war setting in the Middle East is
held similar to a child in a peaceful country in terms of learning. A second issue is that
humans have emotions but machines don’t. Humans have interactions around, smile, cry,
enjoy and so on, while computers are emotionally stable if proper to say. Emotions will
certainly affect the learning process as the Social Learning Theory asserts. We, as researchers,
had better concentrate on the given pitfalls and work on improving this effective theory of
learning.
With the emergence of technological devices and tools such as television, the
telephone, computers and their increasingly widespread use in social life, the 1950s witnessed the
psychologists’ tough work on categorizing the way the human brain works as a similar tool to
computer processing system which was a highly popular analogy at that time. This is claimed
by many to be an effort by cognitive psychologists to keep up with the changing and rising
technology trend of the decade. Cognitive scientists believed that the human brain was
marvelously efficient in solving problems and thinking critically. They, hence, put forward
the theory of Information Processing Model that included three prominent functions such as
sensory memory that assists people to get the information around via bodily senses, working
memory that supports people in managing and storing a huge amount of information through
mental work, and long-term memory that acts like storage providing all-time access to
information in a practical and ready-to-use way.
What interests me most as an enthusiastic instructor is that cognitive information
theory can be utilized in learning and teaching settings to yield better results in the acquisition
and behavioral change. To actualize this, a number of skills play a role in the process which
are focusing (concentration) skills, information gathering (collection) skills, remembering
(knowing) skills and lastly organizing (categorization) skills. Beyond their assistance to
instructors to designing learning environments, all these can aid learners themselves
understand a situation and decide how to act appropriately, collect information on and around
this situation and clarify it more thoroughly, encode and retrieve information when necessary,
and compare, organize, sequence all representations of the information input taken in the
previous steps. Such skills will also serve learners as metacognition skills that have been
extremely vital to humankind to survive all through his/her real-life scenarios.
In this essay, I’ve attempted to clarify the analogy between the human brain and
computers established by cognitive scientists and touch upon the very basic structure of how
the system works in the brain. Besides, the contributions of cognitive information processing
theory to instruction and learning were mentioned. There is no doubt that this theory is a
crucial one in the history of psychology studies regarding learning. Particularly when
compared to the previous theories of learning such as radical behaviorism, the cognitive theory is
well-grounded, properly-explained and meaningfully-structured. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t bear a number of pitfalls. First of these theoretical shortcomings is that cognitive
scientists claim that just like a computer processor, the human brain is also isolated from the
effects of the context it is in. To be more clear, a child in a war setting in the Middle East is
held similar to a child in a peaceful country in terms of learning. A second issue is that
humans have emotions but machines don’t. Humans have interactions around, smile, cry,
enjoy and so on, while computers are emotionally stable if proper to say. Emotions will
certainly affect the learning process as the Social Learning Theory asserts. We, as researchers,
had better concentrate on the given pitfalls and work on improving this effective theory of
learning.
Comments
Post a Comment