What Are Cognitive Processes?

In general psychology, the cognitive process refers to the process by which the human brain reflects the nature of objective objects and the relationships between objects through forms such as feeling, perception, memory, thinking, and imagination. ^[1]

(1) The term of Piaget School: refers to the process of assimilating and adapting stimuli to the equilibrium through the original cognitive structure (schema). This is the point of view of structuralist cognitive psychology.

(2) The terminology of information processing cognitive psychology: refers to the process by which individuals receive, encode, store, extract and use information. It usually consists of four components: perception system (receiving information), memory system (information coding, storage and retrieval), control system (supervising execution decision), and response system (control information output). ^[2]

Cognitive process perception

Perception is the direct reflection of the individual attributes of objective things in the human brain. Objective things directly affect human senses, causing nerve impulses, which are transmitted from the sensory nerves to the corresponding parts of the brain, which produces sensations.

It is divided into two categories: (1) External sensation refers to the feeling of receiving external stimuli and reflecting the attributes of external things. Including vision, hearing, smell, taste, skin. (2) Internal sensation refers to the sensation of receiving internal stimuli of the body, reflecting the position, movement of the body and different states of internal organs, including movement, balance, and body perception. Feeling is not only the beginning and source of a person's psychological activities, but also a necessary condition for people to engage in various practical activities. ^[2]

Cognitive process perception

Perception is the comprehensive reflection of the brain on various characteristics or parts of objective things that directly affect the sense organs. Feeling provides information about the individual attributes, aspects, and parts of objective things, while perception combines these scattered and fragmented information to form a complete image of things. Generally speaking, the richer and more accurate the material of perception, the more complete and correct the perceptual image. Perception is not simply the stacking of felt materials, but the organic unification of these materials according to a certain relationship. As long as the relationship between these characteristics or parts does not change, the perceptual image does not change; the relationship changes, and the perceptual image also changes.

Perception is the result of the coordinated activities of multiple sensory organs. For example, the perception of the shape of an object is the result of cooperative activities such as vision, touch, and kinesthetic. The perception process is affected by the subject's previous knowledge and experience, current needs, emotions and other factors, and has obvious subjectivity and individual differences.

Perception has four basic characteristics, namely holism, selectivity, comprehension, and constancy. There are different classifications of perception, according to which sensory organs play a leading role in perception, and are divided into visual perception, hearing perception, touch perception, smell perception and taste perception. According to the different properties of perceived objects, they are divided into space perception, time perception, and motion perception; according to the degree of connection between the perception process and subjective consciousness, it can be divided into unconscious perception and intentional perception (observation). ^[3]

Cognitive process memory

Memory is the reflection of the human brain on past experience. Including the three basic processes of remembering, keeping, recalling or recognizing. From the perspective of information processing, memory is the process by which the human brain encodes, stores, and extracts information input from the outside. The encoding of information is equivalent to the process of recognizing, and the extraction of information is equivalent to the process of recalling or recognizing. The information that exists in the human brain cannot be extracted when it is applied or an error occurs when it is extracted. Memory not only plays a cornerstone role in people's psychological activities, but also accumulates and draws lessons from people's various practical activities. ^[2]

Cognitive process thinking

Thinking refers to the indirect and generalized reflection of objective things by the human brain. It is a process of rational knowledge that reveals the essential characteristics of things and the internal laws by means of language. Different psychological parties have put forward different ideas. Among them, the Wurzburg School emphasizes non-image thinking; the constructivist emphasizes the role of appearance; the functionalist emphasizes adaptation; the early behaviorists emphasize the role of muscle activity; Piaget Emphasize operations and concepts. According to different standards, thinking can be divided into many categories. These include empirical thinking and theoretical thinking, intuitive thinking and analytical thinking (logical thinking), conventional (habitual) thinking and creative thinking, divergent thinking and convergent thinking, action thinking and image thinking about the relationship between thinking and language. There are three different viewpoints: (1) Language is determined by thinking, thinking cannot be separated from language, and without language, there is no thinking; (2) Thinking and language are independent of each other, denying that the two are necessarily related; (3) Language and thinking are One thing, there is no difference between the two. ^[2]

Cognitive process imagination

Imagination ^[4] refers to the psychological process of the formation and transformation of several images formed in the past under the influence of external reality stimuli. ^[4]