- Explain how we use concepts, prototypes, and schema to organize information
- Understand the difference between natural and artificial concepts
- Describe common problem-solving strategies
Cognition
Upon waking each morning, you begin thinking—contemplating the tasks that you must complete that day. In what order should you run your errands? Should you go to the bank, the cleaners, or the grocery store first? Can you get these things done before you head to class or will they need to wait until school is done?
These thoughts are one example of cognition at work.
Cognition refers to the mental processes we use to acquire, store, manipulate, and use knowledge. It includes activities such as thinking, reasoning, remembering, judging, problem-solving, imagining, and planning. Some cognitive processes—like daydreaming or weighing decisions—are conscious, while others happen automatically in the background.
cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the field of psychology dedicated to examining how people think. It attempts to explain how and why we think the way we do by studying the interactions among human thinking, emotion, creativity, language, and problem-solving, in addition to other cognitive processes.
Cognitive psychologists strive to determine and measure different types of intelligence, why some people are better at problem-solving than others, and how emotional intelligence affects success in the workplace, among countless other topics.
A major focus of cognitive psychology is understanding how the mind structures knowledge—how we take in information from the world and organize it into categories, concepts, and mental models that help us function efficiently.
Categories and Concepts
category
A category is a set of objects that can be treated as equivalent in some way.
For example, consider the following categories: trucks, wireless devices, and weddings. Although the objects in a given category are different from one another, they have many commonalities. When you know something is a truck, you know quite a bit about it. When you think of a wedding, you have a good idea imagining what it might look like. Remember, the psychology of categories concerns how people learn and use informative categories like these.
The mental representations we form of categories are called concepts. There is a real-world category called “trucks,” and you also have a mental concept of “truck” that helps you recognize one when you see it.
Concepts may or may not perfectly match the real-world category. Misconceptions occur when someone’s concept is inaccurate or incomplete.
How We Organize Information: Concepts and Prototypes
Each day, the brain receives an overwhelming amount of sensory information. The senses serve as the interface between the mind and the external environment, receiving stimuli and translating it into nerve impulses that are transmitted to the brain. The brain then processes this information and uses the relevant pieces to create thoughts, which can then be expressed through language or stored in memory for future use. To make this process more complex, the brain does not gather information from external environments only. When thoughts are formed, the mind also pulls information from emotions and memories (Figure 1). Emotion and memory are powerful influences on both our thoughts and behaviors.
To work efficiently, it organizes this input into cognitive structures.
In order to organize this staggering amount of information, the mind has developed a “file cabinet” of sorts in the mind. The different files stored in the file cabinet are called concepts.
concepts
Concepts are categories or groupings of linguistic information, images, ideas, or memories, such as life experiences. Concepts are, in many ways, big ideas that are generated by observing details, and categorizing and combining these details into cognitive structures. You use concepts to see the relationships among the different elements of your experiences and to keep the information in your mind organized and accessible.
Concepts allow us to:
- connect new information to what we already know
- recognize relationships among ideas
- store information efficiently
- generalize from past experience (“projectors have bulbs; this one probably does too”)
They are shaped by experience, emotion, memory, and culture.
Another technique used by your brain to organize information is the identification of prototypes for the concepts you have developed.
prototype
A prototype is the best, most typical, or most familiar example of a concept.
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Prototype of a dog — maybe a Golden Retriever if that was your first pet
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Prototype of furniture —maybe a chair
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Prototype of bird —a robin rather than a penguin
Prototypes help you make quick judgments about category membership.