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During the 1960s, American psychologists investigating and exploring the principles of cognitive theories ultimately developed a new approach called cognitive psychology or information processing. Cognitive psychology included a spectra of processes like attention, perception, thinking, remembering, problem- solving, etc.
They fully gave up studying learning in isolation and this resulted in studying human learning as a whole rather than its different components. The term cognition refers to the processes through which information coming from the senses is transformed.
Scientific investigations show that there is a great resemblance between the t rain and the computer. In view of this, it has been felt that the processes involved in the working of a computer could also explain those involved in human learning.
The aim of the information-processing approach is to isolate the mental stages of processing, their relationships, functions and performance. It declares that whatever mental processes act upon may best be described as information.
Later, we select, encode and retrieve information and use it to solve problems, make decisions and organise overt responses which may be called processing. Learning one chunk of information may depend upon the perceptual organisation brought into play by the individual. For example, if we give a subject a nonsense syllable ‘lon’ to remember, he may encode the attributes of this visual stimulus in terms of the first three letters of the word ‘lonely’ or may code it as the 11th, 14th and 13th letters of the alphabet, or may code it in terms of an abbreviation of London. The information that we pick up from the environment is said to be processed in stages through a succession of transformations from sensory input to response organisation and output.
The stages of processing are not observed directly and they are inferred from the evidence of responses to stimuli, particularly from differences in response patterns. We can only infer the operation of a memory system or a forgetting process by comparing the responses in a variety of stimulus situations.
All the information processing models assume that the central processor, the brain, has limited processing capacity and accept that all the information provided cannot be processed simultaneously. Not only does the brain have a limited amount of storage space for memories, but in addition, the flow of information through any mental stage will not be instant.
The transformation of information between stages is a process that takes time; the brain, like the other organs, cannot do everything at once. If this was not the case, there would be no delays in responding, no forgetting and the system would be prepared to accept as much information as is available.
Clearly, there are numerous everyday instances to observe this limited capacity instances where we suffer from ‘information overload’. When too much information is presented, for the system to handle, a break occurs in the processing system and the result may be observable to an outsider in the form of an accident.
Suppose you are driving in heavy traffic and hoping to be on time for an important appointment that is on your mind. This occupies some of your available processing capacity and the passenger next to you is bothering you with tedious questions which are consuming some more capacity. At this point, we would agree that you are doing about as much as your capacity will permit.
You are on the brink of a processing limit with little spare capacity available. You certainly do not have enough processing capacity left to handle a sudden and unexpected task, such as the driver in front changing his mind and taking a turn and at the same time applying your brakes to avoid a collision. If capacity available is insufficient, you may not avoid a collision.
We are all familiar with instances of being asked to do too much at the same time. And it seems likely that extreme or continuous information overload could be a factor for the onset of a mental breakdown. There is a limit to the amount of information which we can respond to at any one time, but just where the limit is drawn continues to be a question asked by cognitive psychologists.
The limit may occur anywhere in the processing sequence. One group of workers insist that the limit applies to the amount of information perceived, whereas another group argues that we perceive but respond selectively, and yet another group considers that selectivity occurs at many stages, and the breakdown can occur at any of these stages.
There is a limit to the amount of information we can process at any stage and at any one time. We need a process of selection to admit only required information at a particular stage. Such selection processes have been described as controlling processes, because they control the flow of information. Attention is, perhaps, the most noticeable of the control processes, in which the interaction takes place between the sense organs and the environment.
We attend first to one aspect of the environment and then to another as it becomes more important. For instance, in our earlier example, the car driver may be attending to the questions from his passenger. The new information, i.e. a car which is in the front is taking a sudden turn, calls for attention and then the conversation ceases to be important. Thought is given to the new problem about what is to be done to avoid smashed headlights!
The flow of information from one stage to another is said to be determined by control processes such as attention or by established pathways. In the performance of any well-practiced skills, e.g. driving a car, the performer may notice that he does not have to attend continuously to the information input in order to respond continuously.
When this absence of attention occurs, the driver may notice the ‘time-gap phenomenon’ whereby he may find himself at a point in the journey without knowing how he arrived there. Sometimes the time lapse may occur for a few seconds or it may last a minute or so, but during that time obstacles have been encountered and manoeuvres performed without the performer being aware of them.
A momentary diversion of attention from the environmental system and away from a guided response system does not always result in the breakdown of the information processing system. This suggests that processing can continue on ‘automatic controls’ under certain circumstances.
Analysts of information processing maintain that phenomena such as perception, memory, etc. cannot be investigated in isolation from one another. The system must be viewed as a whole rather than as a set of separate systems or processes.
The impact of information processing research has been tremendous. This impact can be traced as far away as below the seas and above the skies through the counterparts of the human beings like robots and computers. This system also explains, analyses and synthesizes behaviour that employs reasoning in a variety of situations like the selecting of stocks or horses or other securities in which an investment broker can wisely invest his or her client’s capital, and a gambler’s bet on horses.
Machines and robots designed to mimic organisms are built in such a way that they often exceed human capabilities in performance and have replaced man in exploring planets other than earth. All this is done through information that is well-programmed and executed to avoid and eliminate all chances of breakdown.
Investigations in information processing in the areas of sensation and perception extended themselves to reach out to the commonest sensory handicaps- blindness and deafness. Rehabilitation of handicapped persons involves a long process of education to enable them to learn skills that come naturally to the able.
The aim of all the schools of the deaf today is to teach speaking and the understanding of speech by lip-reading and sign language which has proved to be highly successful when planned and presented according to information processing models.
One of the most obvious effects of blindness is immobility. The blind could be made independently mobile by devices for obstacle detection and navigation. Their problem could be overcome to some extent by the use of obstacle detectors which may also locate some landmarks and by the use of special maps indicating landmarks which are of the greatest use to blind people.
One aid which has been devised is a long cane – a slightly longer version of the traditional stick, to be carried by the blind and which when tapped from side-to-side in a regular manner in front can detect obstacles such as foot-paths, walls, vehicles and so on. More technically sophisticated aids based on the reflection of inaudible ultrasonic rays have been developed based on the RADAR principle.
These devices have a narrow beam through which the direction and distance of the object can be gauged through sounds. The simplest way to do this is to hold the device in the hand and wave it. This device is called the sonic torch. The users are able to learn to process a great deal of information.
Some sonic torches are stereophonic and head mounted, and the user can detect widely-placed obstacles. In the use of this aid with blind children it has been found that there is a critical period during which the optimum amount of adjustment to the sonic sounds is made.
Insight:
Scientists investigating this field realised that one of the main characteristics of thinking, rather creative thinking, is insight. The sudden appearance of a new idea is called insight. Detailed description provided by scientists and innovators who came out with spectacular discoveries showed similarities in the process described as creative thinking.
Analysis of these experiences showed the occurrence of sudden flashes of ideas or insight. Scientists are busy investigating into the origin, nature and functions of insight as a process. We should not be surprised if they evolve models and aids of insight which could be built into the human system of thinking. The author leave it to the readers’ imaginations to visualize the consequences, good or bad.