What are the basic cognitive processes

To brain mental activity that we carry out all human beings is given the name of cognition. When we speak of cognition, we refer to the internal interpretation of the information that we have stored in the brain, which allows us to capture and have an idea about a thing, such as, for example, knowing what its qualities and its nature.

So cognition is carried out when we make associations from a fact, an observation or a situation. Without this type of qualities, human beings would be unable to have contact with what surrounds us and we would not be able to imagine anything either. In this Psychology-Online article, we will analyze in detail what are the basic cognitive processes and its function.

Index

1. Basic and higher cognitive processes
2. Perception
3. Attention
4. Memory
5. Thought
6. Language

An example of cognition would be when we reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of making some kind of decision, how to decide whether or not to change jobs, to go to live or not to another country, to choose the professional career to be studied, etc. Apparently, human beings think that kind of thing without any effort, however there are certain activities in the background mental as in this case the basic cognitive processes that help us to analyze all that information accumulated in our brain.

The basic cognitive processes are the following:

1. Perception
2. Attention
3. Memory
4. Thought
5. Language

What are higher cognitive processes?

We define higher cognitive processes as union or information integration It comes from basic cognitive processes. A very obvious example of a higher cognitive process is The learning since it is the combination of processes such as attention, memory and thought.

Next, we define all the basic cognitive processes according to psychology.

It is a mental process in which we organize all the information that comes from the environment or from within ourselves to finally make sense of it. The interpretation that human beings make of the world around us is determined mainly by the individual personality of each one, the biological structure of our brain, our interests and the experiences that we have acquired throughout our lifetime. Perception can be divided into:

• Visual perception. Visual perception refers to the ability we have to interpret all the information that we perceive through sight. We began to develop this perception as infants when we first opened our eyes and began to look around us, analyzing everything around us. Generally when we are babies we take approximately 10 million glances around us, which which means that when we reach our first year of life, we already have a huge amount of information. As the years go by, we accumulate through sight, a large number of memories and events, which help us to generate our mental representations.
• Auditory perception. It is about the ability that human beings have to interpret the information that we receive through the ears thanks to the frequencies emitted by the sound media and the air.
• Tactile perception. It is all that information that we perceive through our skin through touch. The area of ​​the brain that is responsible for carrying out this process is called the parietal lobe.
• Olfactory perception. This perception refers to the ability that human beings have to interpret the information that comes to us from outside through smell. The areas of the brain that are responsible for carrying out this function are the olfactory bulb and the piriformis cortex.
• Gustatory perception. This perception refers to the ability we have to interpret the information that comes to us through the contact of certain chemicals with our taste buds.

Attention is a fundamental and extremely important basic cognitive process since thanks to it we can become aware of what is happening in our environment selecting only those stimuli that will be useful to us and leaving aside those that are not useful at certain times. When we pay attention and concentrate on a single thing, we refer to focused attention, however when we attend to more than one thing at the same time, we speak of divided attention.

Generally, when our attention is divided there may be some loss of information due to that a greater mental effort is made since various sources of information are competing between Yes. As a metaphor we can say that we are "picking" a little information from each source.

Memory is an extremely important basic cognitive process because its function is to receive, interpret and store all the information that reaches our brain. So it can be said that memory is a fundamental process for the development of learning and even for human beings to have an individual identity. We can generate memories due to the changes generated by neurons through synaptic transmission in certain areas of the brain, such as the hippocampus.

We can classify memory into two types: long-term memory and short-term memory.

• The memory long-term It is the one that is responsible for storing in the mind all those memories, experiences and / or knowledge for a long time
• On the other hand, memory short term, only stores the information temporarily.

Relationship between basic cognitive processes

It can be said that there is a relationship between attention and memory since when we go through a situation, we can analyze it or not in more detail depending on the attention we pay to it. So we can conclude that many of the memory problems are actually caused by not paying attention to the information that is being offered to us.

Thought is commissioned process all kinds of images, ideas, experiences, sounds, symbols, etc. thanks to the stimulation of various components of the nervous system.

According the cognitive model in psychologyThrough thought we can really manipulate and transform all the information that we have stored in memory. Thought analyzes, evaluates, classifies, compares, makes judgments and knows how to properly apply all those knowledge that we have kept in mind in order to solve problems and create new things taking advantage of all the information. The areas of the brain that are responsible for the functions carried out by thought are the thalamus, the reticular formation and the limbic system, who in turn have certain characteristics that determine the type of thinking that the person is going to have. Thoughts can become positive, negative, pleasant, unpleasant, etc. and depending on them, different emotions can be experienced.

All the elements that are part of the language, such as phrases, sentences, letter sounds, syllables, words, fit with each other to offer us information with its own meaning. The study of language refers to the investigation of those elements that represent it and that make up a grammar of language at the same time. Language can be preserved over time and has been passed down from generation to generation in the society as it allows us to express our thoughts, ideas, emotions and feelings to the rest.

This activity that at first glance may seem so simple but is extremely complex, allows us to have relationshipsAll this through materializing certain symbols that explain our emotional states. The term grammar refers to a set of rules that are based on ideas which are part of a speech, It also refers to the sum of the knowledge that each of us has about the structure of our language. The areas of the brain involved in language are the Broca and Wernicke's area.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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• Smith, E. AND. S., & Kosslyn, S. M. K. (2008). Cognitive processes: neural models and bases(2nd ed.). Madrid, Spain: Pearson.