Cognition

Research:

Cognition is the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge, attention, memory and working memory, judgement and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language.[1]

Quite simply, cognition refers to thinking. There are the obvious applications of conscious reasoning—doing taxes, playing chess, deconstructing Macbeth—but thought takes many subtler forms, such as interpreting sensory input, guiding physical actions, and empathizing with others. The old metaphor for human cognition was the computer—a logical information-processing machine. (You can’t spell cognition without “cog.”) But while some of our thoughts may be binary, there's a lot more to our 'wetware' than 0's and 1's.[2]

Donald Norman distinguishes between two major types of cognition: reflective cognition and experiential cognition. Experiential cognition represents skilled activities that can be conducted without pausing to think. Professional athletes and musicians, soldiers and pilots all show experiential cognition when they can respond to situations automatically. This sort of cognition is relatively effortless, though it requires extensive practice to achieve.

Reflective cognition requires effort, thought and time. It can handle more complex problems than experiential cognition, and benefits from mental tools such as books, pencils, print, language, mathematics.

These types of cognition are often mixed (such as in video games which require reflective problem-solving as well as experiential game-play). Language learning can be seen as moving from primarily reflective cognition (struggling with creating a sentence) to more automatic experiential cognition when one is ‘fluent’ in a language.[3]

Conclusion:

Making decisions day to day is cognition. When you have to think about doing something that is cognition.

Cognition is the human thought, it's the way we make decisions, the way we retain information, the way we make judgements and evaluations.

Experitental cognition, are skills that you practice for that don't require any thought to perform. Professionals all show experiential cognition, they can perform tasks given to them without pausing to think.

Reflective cognition, are skills that require you to apply a thought process. Skills like driving, mathematics, reading, language etc all are reflective cognition. After a while both types of cognition can become mixed. Language learning can be seen as moving from primarily reflective cognition to more automatic experiential coginition.

Computing Cognition

Cognitive computing systems are systems which interact with humans to aid with what either the human can do by themselves or what the computer can do. They are often used when a human needs to decide what to do with a lot of data.

Computers have three ways to aid humans in. They can:

Be used to simulate cognition for artificial intelligence.
Be used to enhance cognition by assisting human intellectual activity.
Be used to help scienctist understand cognition by testing theories on large amounts of data.[4]

Much like Experitental cognition and Reflective Cognition the way these are used aren't exclusive specialists will often adopt techniques designed for others.

Decision Theory

Decision Theory is the theory of making decision.

Humans use this everyday, it's the process of thinking about something for example:

Should I take the bins out tonight?

The thought process of this is reflective you have to think about it. You know that the bin's may be due to go out tonight, but you need to decide if you can be bothered to get up and put them at the end of the drive or leave it for another week or two.

Notice how it also very similar to reflective cognition, it the effort of thinking.

As humans we have spent our whole lives making decision's - Reflective Cognition becomes Experitenta Cognition without us realising. In our most basic functions at one point we used reflective cognition.

More about Decision Theory - http://people.kth.se/~soh/decisiontheory.pdf

Perception and Recognition

Recognition is one of the most complex things we as humans do.

Face recognition is one of the most complex visual tasks performed by the human brain.[5]

Recognition is a match between visual input and mental representation of an object. The match can serve different purposes.

We start using recognition in the womb, by the third trimester we are able to recognise our mothers voice and by the fourth day of life we can recognise her face.[6]


Perception is the way we organise, identify and interpret sensory information to represent and understand the environment.

References:

[1] - N/A. (N/A). Cognition. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition. Last accessed 30th, September, 2014.

[2] - N/A. (N/A). Understanding Cognition. Available: http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/cognition. Last accessed 30th, September, 2014.

[3] - N/A. (N/A). Implications Of Research On Human Memory. Available: http://www.hope.edu/academic/language/forester/calico/calico01.html. Last accessed 30th, September, 2014.

[4] - John F. Sowa. (N/A). Categorization in Cognitive Computer Science.Available: http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/cogcat.htm. Last accessed 2nd October 2014.

[5] - Barton JJ. (2003). Disorders of face perception and recognition..Available: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12916490. Last accessed October 2nd 2014.

[6] - Joanna Hawthorne. (2014). When will my baby start remembering things?. Available: http://www.babycentre.co.uk/x6888/when-will-my-baby-start-remembering-things. Last accessed October 2nd 2014.