Cognitive Information Processing

When stimuli becomes input and behaviour become output, this is conceives as information processing which is called today as cognitive information processing (CIP). There are three basic staged of memory system as sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Sensory memory is the first stage of information processing which is related to vision, hearing etc. and it holds information in memory very briefly. Working memory which is also called as short-term memory is the stage where further processing carried out to make information ready for the long-term storage. Working memory holds information for a limited time as well as it holds limited information. Finally, long-term memory is the permanent storage of information and once information is proceeded into long-term memory, it is never lost. 

Additionally, sensory memory which is temporally has a great deal of visual information yet it decays very rapidly while selective attention is related to learners’ ability to select as well as process information while ignoring other information. However, it should be born in mind that the ability to control attention alters regarding age, intelligence etc. Automaticity occurs when tasks are overlearned or sources of information become habitual such as driving a car. Information selected for further processing comes to the working memory and in this stage, concepts from long-term memory is activated. In order to improve working memory capacity, creating larger bit which is chucking can be applied to process easily. Furthermore, in order to prevent the loss of information from working memory, rehearsaland encoding processes are necessary to being transferred to long-terms storage. Rehearsal occurs when repeating over and over however, repetitions of more complex and meaningful information do not ensure its being fully processed into long-term memory yet encoding does. Encoding is about the process of relating incoming information to concepts as well as ideas in memory since people group related piece of information into categories to learn as well as remember them in a better way. Finally, in terms of long-term memory, episodic memory is related to memory for specific events whereas semantic memory is about the general information stored in memory which can be recalled independently on how it was learnt. How information is represented as well as stored In sematic memory is the main issue of long-term memory (LTM). Furthermore, when learning occurs, environmental input activates the connections among units as well as strengthening some concepts yet weakening others, in other words, parallel processing is a multiple cognitive operation which occurs simultaneously. Therefore, parallel distributed processing (PDP) models have advantages in terms of human information processing. 

Regarding the retrieval of learned information, when information is stored in long-term memory, it can be retained over time or forgotten and this is called as retrieval from long-term memory. Encoding is using previous knowledge to understand as well as learn new material while recall means retrieving previously stored information with no cues or hints to remember. Providing people with cues raises the ability to remember and they are called as cued recall tasks. Moreover, recognition includes a set of stimuli presented to people for a decision or judgment. Also,encoding specificity postulates that whatever cues are used by a learner serves as the best retrieval cues for that information. According to results, recall was the best people who were instructed and tested in the same situation however, when instructional situation differed from testing, recall suffered. In terms of forgetting, the most common explanations are failure to encode, failure to retrieve and interference. 

To conclude, the dictum of “practice makes perfect” should be altered into “perfect practice makes perfect” due to the fact that the amount of practice is not only important yet the kind of practice is what matters.