To the mental activity of the brain What all human beings do is called cognition. When we talk about cognition, we refer to the internal interpretation of the information that we have stored in the brain, which allows us to capture and have an idea about a thing, such as knowing what its qualities and nature are.
So cognition takes place when we make associations from a fact, an observation or a situation. Without these types of qualities, human beings would be unable to have contact with what surrounds us and we would not be able to imagine anything. In this Psychology-Online article, we are going to analyze in detail what are the basic cognitive processes and its function.
Basic and higher cognitive processes
An example of cognition would be when we reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of making some type of decision, such as deciding whether or not to change jobs, go to live in another country or not, choose the professional career to study, etc. . Apparently, human beings think these types of things without any effort, however, there are certain mental activities in the background, such as in this case the basic cognitive processes that help us analyze all that information accumulated in our brain.
The basic cognitive processes are the following:
- Perception
- Attention
- Memory
- Thought
- Language
What are higher cognitive processes?
We define higher cognitive processes as the union or information integration that comes from basic cognitive processes. A very obvious example of a higher cognitive process is The learning since it is the combination of processes such as attention, memory and thinking.
Next, we define all the basic cognitive processes according to psychology.
1. Perception
It is a mental process in which we organize all the information that comes from the environment or from within ourselves to finally give it meaning. The interpretation that human beings make of the world around us is determined mainly by the individual personality of each one, the biological structure of our brain, our interests and the experiences that we have acquired throughout our lives. Perception can be divided into:
- Visual perception. Visual perception refers to the ability we have to interpret all the information that we perceive through sight. We begin to develop this perception as babies when we open our eyes for the first time and begin to look around us, analyzing everything that surrounds us. Generally, when we are babies we take approximately 10 million glances around us, which means that by the time we reach our first year of life, we already have an enormous amount of information stored. As the years go by, we accumulate a large number of memories and events through sight, which help us when generating our mental representations.
- Auditory perception. It is about the ability that human beings have to interpret the information that we receive through our ears thanks to the frequencies emitted by sound media and the air.
- Tactile perception. This is all the information that we perceive through our skin through touch. The area of the brain that is responsible for carrying out this process is called the parietal lobe.
- Olfactory perception. This perception refers to the ability that human beings have to interpret the information that comes to us from the outside through smell. The areas of the brain that are responsible for carrying out this function are the olfactory bulb and the piriform cortex.
- Gustatory perception. This perception refers to the ability we have to interpret the information that comes to us through the contact of certain chemical substances with our taste buds.
2. Attention
Attention is a fundamental and extremely important basic cognitive process since thanks to it we can become aware of what is happening in our environment selecting only those stimuli that are going to be useful to us and leaving aside those that are not useful to us at certain times. When we pay attention and concentrate on a single thing we refer to focused attention, however when we pay attention to more than one thing at a time, we talk about divided attention.
Generally, when our attention is divided there may be some loss of information due to greater mental effort being made as various sources of information are competing with each other. As a metaphor we can say that we are “pecking” a little information from each source.
3. Memory
Memory is an extremely important basic cognitive process because its function is to receive, interpret and store all the information that reaches our brain. So it can be said that memory is a fundamental process for the development of learning and even for human beings to have an individual identity. We can generate memories due to the changes generated by neurons through synaptic transmission in certain areas of the brain, such as the hippocampus.
We can classify memory into two types: long-term memory and short-term memory.
- The memory long-term It is what is responsible for storing all those memories, experiences and/or knowledge in the mind for a long time.
- On the other hand, memory short termonly stores the information temporarily.
Relationship between basic cognitive processes
It can be said that there is a relationship between attention and memory since when we go through a situation, we may or may not analyze it more closely depending on the attention we pay to it. So we can conclude that many memory problems are actually caused by not paying attention to the information that is being offered to us.
4. Thought
Thought is the task of process all types of images, ideas, experiences, sounds, symbols, etc. thanks to the stimulation of various components of the nervous system.
According to , through thought we can actually manipulate and transform all the information that we have stored in our memory. Thinking analyzes, evaluates, classifies, compares, makes judgments and knows how to appropriately apply all the knowledge that we have stored in our minds in order to solve problems and create new things taking advantage of all the information. The areas of the brain that are responsible for the functions carried out by thinking are the thalamus, the reticular formation and the , which in turn have certain characteristics that determine the type of thinking that the person will have. Thoughts can be positive, negative, pleasant, unpleasant, etc. and depending on them you can experience different emotions.
5.Language
All the elements that are part of language, such as phrases, sentences, letter sounds, syllables, words, fit together to offer us information with its own meaning. The study of language It refers to the investigation of those elements that represent it and that at the same time make up a grammar of the language. Language can be preserved over time and has been transmitted from generation to generation in society as it allows us to express our thoughts, ideas, emotions and feelings to others.
This activity, which at first glance may seem so simple but is extremely complex, allows us to have relationships, all of this through materializing certain symbols that explain our emotional states. The term grammar refers to a set of rules that are based on ideas which are part of a discourse, it also refers to the sum of the knowledge that each of us has about the structure of our language. The areas of the brain that intervene in language are
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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References
- Gloria Fuenmayor, GF (1970, January 1). Perception, attention and memory as cognitive processes used for textual comprehension. Retrieved November 25, 2018, from http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=170118859011
Bibliography
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Smith, EES, & Kosslyn, SMK (2008). Cognitive processes: neural models and bases (2nd ed.). Madrid, Spain: Pearson.