Cognitive Psychology Issues - Essay Example

Until the 1950's, the dominant school of thought within psychology was that of behaviorism in which human behavior responses were observed in reaction to environmental stimuli. During the 1950's and 70's there was a shift against the behavioral school of thought and there was a growing interest in topics such as attention, memory and problem solving skills. What occurred during these years is nothing more than a revolution in thought in which a considerable amount of research into processing models was conducted giving rise to the cognitive research methods giving rise to a school of thought that was able to branch its research into the fields of philosophy, neuroscience and linguistics. Cognitive psychology, a term coined by Ulric Neidder in 1967 in a book of the same name, is the means of describing the reactions of the mind in the light of a computer metaphor while not reducing the mind to something computer in nature and is the more scientific form of psychology. As like other materialist sciences, cognitive psychology recognizes that the mind is defined by what the brain does and that the brain is a physical system that functions via the means of natural law, through the means of cause and effect in other words through functionalism. The goal of cognitive psychology is to focus on how many thoughts or "items" we can hold within our memory simultaneously, how sensory data is blended in order to produce higher-level inferences, what the human strengths and weaknesses are in terms of judgment of every day situations, the formation of conceptual categories and how knowledge is represented within the human mind. The core focus of cognitive psychology's core focus is trying to understand how humans acquire, store and process information. This understanding on how the brain and mind work helps in further understanding the accuracy of decision making to developing curriculums to enhance learning. The focus of this paper will be on divided attention, focused attention and division of attention between tasks and will conclude with a brief examination of attention in regards to limited mental development such as abused children's heightened sense of attention in light of their lack of actual emotional development. Cognitive process is the processes which are very important to understanding human behavior in light of knowledge, how we obtain and process various forms of knowledge. It refers to the information processing of individuals psychological functions and tends to apply to the ability to understand and retain knowledge as well as out ability to perceive our environment, actions, problem solving abilities and mental imagery. When contrasted to the concept of attention one finds that, "attention acts as a means of focusing limited mental resources on the information and cognitive processes that are most salient at a given moment" (Sternberg 1999). We also find that there are three basic types of human attention being vigilance, auditory/visual or focused and divided attention. The first concept of human attention is that of vigilance. Vigilance is a person's ability to attend to a single field of stimulation for a prolonged period of time while seeking to detect the appearance of a particular target (Steinberg 1999). For the most part a vigilant or focused attention involves waiting for something unpredictable to happen, such as waiting for ones pet to do an unsignaled trick or watching the birds outside a window, here the person is vigilant in their task and content on just watching and focusing, waiting for something unpredictable to happen and being vigilant in just watching. This follows along the same theory as Signal Detection where in a subject's task is to detect a signal which is presented along some sensory continuum. The signal detection theory is used to analyze experimental data where the task is to categorize ambiguous stimuli generated by either a known process of based on pure chance. Another example is that of the radar operator who must decide if what they see on the radar screen indicated the presence of an object/signal or the presents of a parasites or noise (McNicol 2004). This then brings us to the concepts of focused attention, of which there are two subgroups auditory and visual. Auditory focused attention is best described by the cocktail party phenomena, which is ones ability to focus on a single conversation and ignoring the surrounding noise (Cherry 1953). This phenomenon occurs while we are both paying attention one of the sounds around us and when a sudden stimulus attracts our attention. A prime example is when we are in a party environment, listening to a conversation, then suddenly our name is called and we immediately respond to the new sound, in fact in an acoustic source, the one in which humans concentrate on, seems to be about three times louder than the ambient noise and a microphone recording will show a big comparison in response to our abilities with ambient noise (Cherry 1953). In comparison the Broadbents filter model, created by Donald Broadbent an influential English psychologist in the 1960's, accounts for a theoretical filter device located in between the sensory register and short term memory storage. Broadbents theory is based upon a multi-storage paradigm where the filter functions together with a buffer that enables the subject to handle two kinds of stimuli at the same time (Broadbents 1958). What this buffer indicates is our ability to handle one stimuli while allowing the other one to wait for later processing (Broadbents 1958). In regards to focused visual attention, here we have the idea of shifting attention from one target to another. We have overt movement of head and/or eyes and the ability to have an internal shift in conditions where there is limited to no time for eye movement. According to influential psychologist Ann Treisman, developed the feature integration theory of attention where in different kinds of attention are responsible for binding different features into a consciously experienced wholes (Treisman & Gelade 1980). Essentially this theory describes the role of attention in the perceptual process where the detecting features such as color, size corners and lines, of a stimulus is presented within a parallel context and needs no attention. The integration of these features into a percept is done one after the other and des require attention (Treisman & Gelade 1980). This then brings us to the topic of divided attention. Where as focused attention examines the extent of how one can focus one task while ignoring others, divided attention is the process in which we can do more than one task at the same time. The idea of strategic control or the degree in which ones attention can be allocated, relatively to competing tasks where by practice helps to improve the ability to do tasks in a simultaneous fashion and under the pretence that practice leads to automaticity and the notion that an automatic task, such as filling a glass with water, requires very little attention (Wickens & Gopher 1977). Divided attention also brings about the notion that doing similar tasks, tasks of the same nature are easier for the human brain to manage than doing two very dissimilar tasks. Much of our everyday encoding does occur against the background of ongoing activities and noise (Cabeza, Nyberg & Park 2005). People frequently attempt to perform two or more tasks at the same time which leads to an understanding of how encoding processes function within the context of distracting activities and key in characterizing memory effectively (Cabeza, Nyberg & Park 2005). There is strong evidence from the behavioral literature in which the encoding processes that can occur when distracting tasks or information are present and are at more of a disadvantage by age retrieval process. In terms of this paper, its interesting to note when one ages mentally and physically different patterns of neural activation between divided and full-attention conditions are to be expected (Cabeza, Nyberg & Park 2005). When taking into regard the three types of attention, one has to take into consideration what happens to attention when we either age, are placed in situations where certain types of attention are compromised or just have a general hick-up in our mental cognition. Defects of attention are frequently found in cases where the brain has been compromised physically in some way, either from stroke, closed head injuries or even psychopathology (Posner 2004). Years ago the only clue in understanding human attention and how the brain organized it was through the study of lesioned patients suffering from neglect most often due to lesions of the right parietal lobe. What was failed in this early application of understanding attention and emotion is that of what influence our early adolescent growth has in regards to our emotional/attention growth. Here we have subjects ranging from neglected children whose brain and development growth can be documented through their lifespan. What the study of abused children bring to the study of attention is that of how early experience influences brain development as associated with the regulatory process. The maltreatment of children often evinces unusual patterns of expression, emotion and their ability to regulate emotional states. The attention process appears to play a central role in the ontogenesis of emotional difficulties in these children. These children have a heightened ability to shift their attention from the different aspects of their environment and their adaptability, such as the ability to avert ones eyes from a grotesque situation or the ability to distract oneself with mundane tasks in order to avoid worrying about impending concerns (Posner 2004). It is interesting to note that these children tend to have with their development of attention, focused, divided and divisional, is that of a heightened sense of understanding the emitting of emotion. At a huge cost to the child, they are able to recognize cues of anger much faster than the averaged developed human just based upon their environmental growth. They are able to attune their attention through cues in order to better coupe with their environment. These children present patterns of information processing that suggest children who experience early abuse process certain types of emotional information atypically while appearing to process other types of emotional information similarly to non-maltreated children, again this group of children have a heightened response to there ability to respond via their attention abilities. They exhibit the ability to adapt and perform a self regulatory process in order to adapt to their environment that is only self evident within children of an abusive background and seems to be a developed response that is lacking within children who grew up in healthy and supportive environment that exhibited normal brain and developmental growth (Pollak & Tolley-Schell 2003). In regarding the topic of abused children, we have to keep into consideration the three modes of attention. It seems fairly self evident that these children would have a heightened response to visual and auditory responses, it seems obvious that they would be able to respond better to the visual cues one presents when emoting anger (Pollock, Vardi, Putzer-Bechner & Curtin 2005), but what about their response to the other two forms of attention are they too heightened in light of their obvious 'healthy' development of the brain These two other forms of attention, divided and division are also heightened in their development, their ability to focus in on one conversation over another is crucial to their environmental especially in light of the detection of the emotion of anger, a cue to the ever existing violence within their everyday life. The ability to 'hone' in on one aspect of a conversation in order to decipher the tone of voice and establish the overall emotion of the situation is a heightened response to the survival within their environment (Pollock, Vardi, Putzer-Bechner & Curtin 2005). The abused child's response to divided attention has been found necessary in response to their ability to coupe with the attention known as vigilance. Here they have the heightened ability to look busy within their environment while dividing their attention tasks, the ability to 'play' in a selective manner and pay attention to the reactions of those around them. It is interesting in that the standard method of divided attention is the ability to conduct two very similar tasks with ease; it is also the response of normal brain development (Cabeza, Nyberg & Park 2005). The abused child exhibits the ability to devise tasks that are different in their approach, again the ability to play while paying attention to the visual or verbal cues around them that could predict an impending negative response to their environment (Pollock, Vardi, Putzer-Bechner & Curtin 2005). The abuse child has the ability to be vigilant is also heightened. The ability to watch and be aware of their environment while awaiting a negative environmental response, vigilant in their ability to wait for an environmental response in order to cue their primal flight or fight response (Pollock, Vardi, Putzer-Bechner & Curtin 2005). In closing, the goal of this paper was to outline the three aspects of attention and contrast them to the abused child, who from a developmental perspective has a very low developmental and behavioral regulation. Here we briefly examined the general belief that negative stimuli retards normal developmental growth while heightening a child's response to the rather salient notion of negative or anger emotions and the child's ability to hone in on that one particular emotion in light of the three aspects of attention growth (Pollock, Vardi, Putzer-Bechner & Curtin 2005). What this study brings about is the notion that these children have a heightened response to negative stimuli and their ability to adapt to self-regulation, what this essay needs to conclude with is the fact that these children's heightened response to attention and anger is just that, a heightened response to anger and their ability to understand, predict and be aware of other more health emotions such as happy, joy contentment is greatly retarded. In other words the child's development has been so much in response to salient negative emotions that their ability to respond to positive emotions is at a bare minimal (Pollock, Vardi, Putzer-Bechner & Curtin 2005), thus contrasting limited mental development to that of the three aspects of emotion. Work Cited Broadbent, D. (1958). Perception and Communication. London: Pergamon Press Carbeza, R., Nyberg, L., & Park, D., (2005) Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging: Linking Cognitive and Cerebral Aging Oxford: Oxford University Press Cherry, E. C. (1953) "Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears" Journal of Acoustical Society of America 25(5), 975-979 McNicol, D (2004) A Primer of Signal Detection Theory Routledge, New York Pollak, S.D., Vardi, S., Putzer-Bechner A.M., Curtin, J.J., "Physically abused children's regulation of attention in response to hostility" Child Development 76(5) 968-77 Pollak, S.D., & Tolley-Schell, S.A., "Selective attention to facial emotion in physically abused children" Journal of Abnormal Psychology 112(3) 323-338 Posner, M., (2004) Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention London: The Guilford Press Sternberg, R. J. (1999) "The theory of successful intelligence." Review of General Psychology, 3, 292-316 Treisman, A., & Gelade, G., (1980) "A feature integration theory of attention" Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97-136 Wickens, C.D & Gopher D. (1977) "Control theory measures of tracking and indices of attention allocating strategies" Human Factors, 19, 249-366 Read More