Cognitive processes: what exactly are they and why do they matter in psychology?

These mental phenomena explain many of the things that occur in our brain.

It is very common that when talking about some aspect of the psyche, whether from psychology or from other sciences such as medicine, the concept of "cognitive process" comes up at some point. the concept of "cognitive process"..

It is a term that is very often used and sometimes it is not clear what it refers to, and it can be confusing. In fact, it can sometimes be difficult to determine what is or is not a process of these characteristics. That is why in this article we explain what a cognitive process is and expose some of the most relevant in our usual operation.

Conceptualizing: what are cognitive processes?

Cognitive processes are understood as the whole set of mental operations that we perform in a more or less sequential way in order to obtain some kind of mental product. They are each of the operations that we perform that allow us to capture, codify, store and work with the information coming both from the outside and from from the outside as well as from the inside.

Each and every one of the cognitive processes that we carry out are fundamental in achieving our adaptation to the social environment, and even our survival, through their influence on our behavior. We have to think that every physical or mental act we carry out, from picking up a plate to eat to singing in the shower, kissing someone or simply writing this article implies that we have processed a series of information and that we are operating with it.

One aspect to take into account is that it is generally considered that cognitive process and emotion are separate. However, it is possible to observe that in information processing, emotional activation is of great importance, as it contributes to give meaning to the experienceIt contributes to endowing the experience with meaning and is fundamental when processing information and valuing it. It is for this reason that under this perspective it could be considered to be part of these cognitive processes.

Types of cognitive processes

There are a large number of cognitive processes, but they can be broadly divided into two typologies: basic and superior.

Basic cognitive processes

Basic cognitive processes serve as the basis for the further elaboration and processing of information.. They are those that allow information to be captured and maintained in our system in order to be able to work with it.

Sensoperception

Sometimes separated into sensation and perception, this type of basic cognitive process is what allows information to be processed by our system. We capture sensations through the different receptors available to us in our organism we have in our organism and then we perceive them by organizing the information from the receptors and giving it a meaning.

Within this category we include, among other aspects, perceptual analysis and organization and the reception of information.

Attention

Attention is the cognitive process that allows human beings to select, focus and maintain their mental resources on a given stimulation, to stop devoting them or to separate resources. There are different types of attentionAmong them are focused or sustained, divided, voluntary or involuntary, overt or covert.

Information processing

Closely linked to attention and perception, information processing is one of the basic cognitive processes which allows us to process the captured information and to elaborate it.

In this sense, we must take into account the existence of automatic processing (involuntary and with little interference with other processes) and controlled processing (requiring a certain level of mental effort), serial (sequential) and parallel (several processes are carried out at the same time), bottom-up (we start from the stimulation to generate the processing) and top-down (expectations lead us to process the stimulation) and global or local (depending on whether we first capture the totality or the details of the stimulation).

Memory

Another of the basic processes, memory plays a fundamental role in cognition since it allows us to keep previously perceived information in the system and to work with it in both the short and long term. work with it both in the short and long term..

Within memory we can find declarative memory (including autobiographical and procedural memory) and non-declarative memory (such as procedural memory). Working memory is also part of itThis is an essential element that allows us to work with information currently gathered or to retrieve elements of long-term memory.

Higher cognitive processes

Higher cognitive processes are considered to be those that represent the maximum level of integration of information, being processes that are derived from the union of information from various sensory modalities and basic cognitive processes. and basic cognitive processes. They are often conscious and require mental effort to perform.

Thinking

The main and best known higher cognitive process is thinking. In it we integrate all the information and from it we perform different mental operations. It allows us to form concepts, to elaborate judgments and deductions, and to learn.. Some of the types of thinking that we can find are inductive, deductive and hypothetical-deductive reasoning. Thinking includes both the capacity for representation and symbolization and the analysis and integration of information, as well as the drawing of inferences.

Executive functions

Although they could be incorporated as part of thinking or separated into different basic processes, the set of executive functions allows us to manage behavior and the set of cognitive processes through the implementation of different skills such as behavioral inhibition, planning or decision making. skills such as behavioral inhibition, planning or decision making, among many others. among many others. These are functions that allow us to orient our behavior towards medium and long-term goals and prevent urgent impulses from taking control of our behavior.

Learning

The ability to learn is largely derived from the ability to pay attention to stimulation and then store it in memory for later retrieval.

Language

Language is considered a higher cognitive process, which, in addition to communicating with the environment and our fellow human beings, is used to internally regulate our behavior (through self-instructions). It is important to keep in mind that we are not only talking about oral language, but also about other types of communication..

However, it is important to note that language is not the same as thought. This has been known from empirical verifications in people with aphasia, i.e., who have the brain structures responsible for language destroyed and not operative.

Creativity

Creativity is considered by some authors as a superior cognitive process, since it involves the elaboration of novel strategies or ways of thinking, far from what has been and far from what has been learned and acquired through experience.

Thus, the cognitive processes that belong to the field of creativity are those that escape the conventional routes of thought, those that, starting from an image or an intuition, turn an idea around and, from there, create something new.

Motivation

This is the cognitive process by which we link and dedicate our energy to a particular enterprise, linking cognition, emotion and arousal. Thanks to it we can direct our behavior and it can facilitate or hinder the acquisition or processing of information. We can also find different types of motivation, such as intrinsic and extrinsic.

The behaviorist critique

Importantly, not the entire field of psychology accepts the existence of cognitive processes. In particular, many variants of the behaviorist paradigm point out that they are, at most, a metaphor for what actually occurs. For these behaviorist perspectives, what we call mental processes are in any case attributions to internal mental phenomena that in theory explain part of what psychology really explains (or should explain): behavior, understood as relationships between stimuli and actions that can be modified through training or learning.

Thus, for behaviorism, the concept of mental process is an unnecessary leap of faith, given that it is not necessary to assume that it is necessary to assume that the mental process is a mental process.since it is not necessary to assume that there are private psychological processes that generate from the inside out the behavior we can observe.

Bibliographical references:

• Blomberg, O. (2011). "Concepts of cognition for cognitive engineering". International Journal of Aviation Psychology. 21 (1): 85 - 104.
• T.L. Brink (2008) Psychology: A Student Friendly Approach. "Unit 7: Memory." p. 126.
• Von Eckardt, Barbara (1996). What is cognitive science? Massachusetts: MIT Press. pp. 45 - 72.