Cognitive Processes

Cognitive Processes

This paper will try to analyze three types of cognitive processes and will explain the purpose of each one of the selected elements. Also, three peer-reviewed studies are brought to the reader's attention, including one study for each cognitive process. The paper will summarize the selected studies, evaluating the research methodology used in each one of them. The cognitive processes selected are attention, language, and problem solving. These processes are essential for the behavioral activity of each individual, focusing the knowledge element and the mechanisms of using knowledge in subjects' benefit. Cognitive processes are influencing individual's everyday life, and often occur very fast.

Language

The function of language appears in the childhood, at a very young age, and represents a process of communication between individuals, when they wish to express feelings, ideas, or thoughts. There are various techniques in regards to language: oral, body language, or language of signs. Language includes a collection of terms related to specific topics known as a lexicon. They interfere continuously during verbal communication and recollection of vocabulary, transmitting to cognitive mind lexical judgments that occurred in those processes. Verbal communication is characterized by several elements: communicative, uninformed, and generative aspects, control and self-motivation. The communicative aspect refers to the speech between people. Uniformed aspect refers to connection that exists between verbal communication and meaning. The controlled element illustrates the modality in which the subjects express their sentences. Generative aspect refers to the limits of each individual in regards to vocabulary used to express him or herself. Self-motivated element is involved in the acquisition of a second or foreign language. Each aspect of verbal communication is essential, regardless the origin of the spoken language. In cognitive psychology the language is formed from various elements: words, sentences, text, and units of language phonology. A phoneme is an abstract set of speech sounds, and belongs to phonetics. The words are elements in which the phonemes are fitting together, producing hundreds of thousands of constructions in a given language. A sentence represents a grammatical arrangement of words that gives the individual the capacity to put together thoughts during verbalization or writing. The text is formed from a constellation of interconnected sentences that clarify a specific issue or field of study. The subject discovers and learns the language through these main aspects of verbal communication exposed above (Robinson-Riegler, 2008).

Attention

Attention is monitoring and processing daily data, and helps the subject to focus and concentrate on certain aspects of the surrounding environment, disregarding in the same time other aspects not essential at that moment. The subject, who pays attention to something, or to a person, allocates resources and concentrates on that specific data. Attention, in the cognitive process, places limits on the individual's thoughts, words, and beliefs in a certain moment, focusing on a specific number of elements. An example could be the person who is listening to one's conversation, while paying no interest to other subjects who are speaking in the same setting, simultaneously. Attention plays an important role not only in psychology, but in the neuro-scientific and educational field too. The cognitive part of the brain is working only when psychological actions and processes are guided by attention to work organized, in a group.

Attention is organizing locally the mental actions, guiding the memory in the process of classification and research, when the mind is digging in the past, present, future, imaginary, or other circumstances. Attention is also present when the mind converts perceptions into feelings and actions. It is breaking down the immense amount of data gathered by cognition, in order to concentrate on specific things important for the individual (Robinson-Riegler, 2008).

Problem-solving

Problem-solving processes appear in our daily life; some of them are characterized by routine and others by complexity. Aging influences cognitive ability of solving problems, and routine may become a more complex process. The purpose of problem-solving is to target a problem and to discover the best solution for that specific issue. There are various strategies for problem-solving, and the best one is chosen by the individual according to the circumstances. In some cases the individual is solving the problem using realistic information from his or her data base. In other situations the individual uses the imagination to choose the best solution. The problem-solving cycle follows certain steps that develop the approach to the problem, and classifies information. Often, the sequence of problem-solving is not strictly followed by the individual in order to discover resolution. The subjects are skipping steps, or going back several times until the preferred solution is obtained. The problem-solving circuit has seven steps: problem identification, defining the problem, building a strategy, organizing data, allocating resources, supervising the progress, and results evaluation (Robinson-Riegler, 2008).

Studies and Research

In Burns, Nettelbeck, and McPherson's (2009) analytic study of attention