Computers are not alone in being equipped with powerful processors. The human brain is capable of making more than one billion calculations per second, based on the information it gathers through perception, judgment, reasoning, and recognition in order to constantly create and adjust concepts of itself and the external world. This produces a sense of ''knowing'' or understanding within the individual. The mind also gathers information through experiencing, sensing, and thinking. This state of calculating and information processing is known as cognition. A healthy human brain possesses more than 100 billion nerve cells (each of which might possess up to 10,000 connections with other neurons) dedicated to cognition alone. Cognition exists in several different domains in the brain, and it is responsible for many separate functions that regulate behavior. Cognitive processes determine people's attention, executive function, memory, emotion recognition, and emotional biases.
So, what is cognitive theory? The cognitive theory definition asserts that the way people behave is a product of the information they gather externally and the way they interpret that information internally. There are two main approaches. The example above falls in line with the information-processing approach, the computational-representational theory of thought, or CRTT. This approach seeks to understand the way the human mind works by comparing it to a supercomputer. American psychologists Robert Sternberg and Hermon A. Simon have both worked to prove this theory. Sternberg looked at the way people who take intelligence tests process information, and Simon has attempted to program computers to mimic human thought process (cognition).
The second approach to cognitive theory was developed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who was the first to systematically study cognitive development. Piaget's goal was to observe and explain the processes used by infants and children to become individuals capable of reasoning and thinking. He concluded that people use mental frameworks called schemas to build their internal senses of reality. According to Piaget, schemas are tied together with a core meaning. As people continue to exist in the world, they will gather and process more stimuli, or external information. Piaget framed cognitive processing in terms of assimilation and accommodation. When people use an existing schema to make sense of environmental stimuli, they are assimilating that experience. Assimilation is how someone interprets their life experiences. The way someone adjusts their internal models after interpreting (assimilating) is known as the accommodation process of cognitive theory.
According to Piaget, people undergo four stages of cognitive development from infancy through childhood. The first stage is called the sensorimotor stage. During this stage, babies and toddlers develop object permanence—knowing that something continues to exist even if it's not immediately visible to the naked eye. This could explain why toddlers begin to outgrow games like ''Peekaboo.'' Sensorimotor is the first stage because developing object permanence requires the presence of a schema. After acquiring sensorimotor skills, children from ages 2-7 develop the ability to make one thing stand for another by thinking symbolically. This is known as the preoperational stage. During this stage, a child might pick up a stick and use it as a sword (while understanding that the stick is still a stick), or they might want to participate in role play games like house or school.
Sometime between ages 7-11, Piaget said that children undergo a watershed moment in their cognitive development: they begin to think logically (or operationally). He called this the concrete operational stage. At this stage, children will start to understand things like sub-categories (not only are there different species of plants like trees and flowers, but there can also be different types of trees and flowers; pine trees versus redwoods for example, or pink roses versus yellow roses). They will also start to understand that the mass of objects can be distributed among different vestibules while retaining the same mass. For example, eight ounces of milk will look different depending on what it's poured into. When asked, ''Which object contains more milk?'' young children are likely to choose the largest cup, or the cup which appears more full. In contrast, children who have hit the concrete operational stage will be more likely to understand the idea of conservation, and that the size of the cup which contains the milk has no bearing on the milk's actual mass. After this stage, Piaget said there is still one more cognitive developmental milestone that all people hit. The formal operational stage begins around age 11 and lasts through adulthood for most people. This is when people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts, perform hypothetical reasoning, do mathematics problems in their heads, and to think about potential outcomes (even if those outcomes are something the child has never experienced).
Cognitive theory is a multidisciplinary idea. When it was developed, researchers adapted the rigorous observation standards of behaviorism to approach cognition from the most scientific standpoint possible. There is overlap between cognitive science, cognitive sociology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive learning approaches.
Cognitive Thinking Definition
Perhaps it's easy to imagine the mind as a computer because of the number of processes that go into cognitive thinking. Knowing, remembering, judging, problem solving, and thinking are higher-level brain functions that impact a person's imagination, language skills, planning ability, and perception. Some researchers call emotion-based mental processes (like reward-based learning) ''hot'' cognition and emotion-free mental processes (like working memory) ''cold'' cognition. In essence, cognitive thinking can be defined as the mental processes involved in knowing and understanding information.
Some educators allow cognitive theory and cognitive thinking principles to inform their teaching and assessment methodologies. This can help them scaffold learner material based on their cognitive development; there's no sense in teaching logic and reasoning to a child who has not yet reached the formal operational stage, after all. To be successful in school, it is thought that students need to develop both sustained and selective attention, their working memories, their long-term memories, and their logic and reasoning abilities. On top of that, classroom-based learning involves improving the rate that student brains can handle obtaining new information, i.e., their processing speeds. This applies to both visual and auditory processing. Each of these cognitive skills has classroom applications; students whose visual processing is not developed can struggle with math problems and reading comprehension. Students with auditory processing delays can struggle to blend and segment sounds, thus impacting their ability to spell or read. Students with selective or sustained attention problems can impact the entire learning environment. Cognitive learning theory suggests that teachers should give each student the opportunity to learn how their own thought processes work, with the idea that this will better support the acquisition of knowledge.
Examples of Cognition
The desire to understand the way humans think dates back to Plato and Descartes. In modern times, Piaget studied children to understand cognition. For very young children still in the sensorimotor stage, he was able to distinguish between a baby and a toddler's developmental milestones by demonstrating object permanence. One experiment that Piaget developed involved consistently hiding a toy under a blanket. Children who were between 18 and 24 months took the initiative to search for the toy, where younger babies didn't. Piaget thought the toddlers' searches demonstrated object permanence cognition. Children in early elementary school are often encouraged to engage in make-believe, or dramatic play. This type of play demonstrates object representation, or the ability to make one object symbolize another. It indicates preoperational cognition, and it is an important cognitive developmental milestone. When children begin to develop logic and reasoning, they can demonstrate it through the ability to think about and describe processes in a flexible way. If asked to retell something, they could skip steps or re-order things, whereas children who have not yet developed that level of cognition would need to stick to the original order of events. In the classroom, teachers can have students do multi-step activities like write down new vocabulary words, search for their definitions, and then quiz each other. These activities can help with another cognitive milestone: decentering, or how to analyze things from multiple angles. Another example of cognition is the ability to demonstrate abstract thought. In the classroom, teachers can quiz older students with hypothetical questions that require students to examine their schemas and internal models.
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