Cognition is an act or process of knowing. Cognition includes attention, perception, memory, reasoning, judgment, imagining, thinking, and speech. Attempts to explain the way in which cognition works are as old as philosophy itself; the term, in fact, comes from the writings of Plato and Aristotle. With the advent of psychology as a discipline separate from philosophy, cognition has been investigated from several viewpoints.
Human Cognition
Theories of human cognition assume that people are natural logicians, who only fail to reach valid conclusions when misunderstanding the problem. The mistaken understanding of a problem may be incorporated, encoded, into a schema from which the inferences (which are valid as far as the understanding of the information is concerned) are made. One example of this is Braine’s Abstract-rule Theory, which claims that the possible errors may be one of three kinds: comprehension errors, heuristic inadequacy errors, and processing errors.
Human knowledge construction consists of two main processes– acquisition and transformation (Kang & Byun, 2001) and a knowledge base. The acquisition process includes all cognitive activities for acquiring information and stimulus from environment. The transformation process has diverse cognitive activities, which combine the incoming information with prior knowledge and make them meaningful. The knowledge base works as the resource for both acquisition and transformation, and it is the destination of newly constructed knowledge as well (Gagne et al., 1993). The three major components, knowledge base, acquisition, and transformation are closely interconnected, which makes the entire knowledge construction processes dynamic.
Along with three major components, the conceptual model consists of other three elements: context, internal state, and monitoring. Context refers to the external environment of an individual, and internal state refers to the individual characteristics. Both have factors influencing the knowledge construction processes (Wilson & Myers, 1999). They cause changes in the process of....
