Cognition: Processes, Brain Function, and Memory Systems Analysis

This essay provides a comprehensive overview of cognition, defining it as the processes involved in gaining knowledge and understanding thoughts, senses, and experiences. It delves into the connection between brain function and cognitive processes, emphasizing the role of both conscious and unconscious cognition, including memory, pattern recognition, and problem-solving. The essay discusses the computational aspects of cognition, including symbolic and sub-symbolic computation, and explores the multiple memory systems theory, examining short-term and long-term memory. Furthermore, it analyzes cognitive theories of reasoning, the psychology of reasoning, and the acquisition of language, touching upon Chomsky's revolutionary ideas and other relevant theories. The essay concludes by highlighting the importance of cognition science and its various aspects, emphasizing the brain's central role, the impact of computation, memory systems, and language development. It references key academic sources to support its arguments.

Running head: COGNITION
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Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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The term cognition can be defined as the medical action or the processes for the purpose
of gaining knowledge and also understanding the thoughts, senses and experiences. It involves
different aspects of the intellectual functions and different processes like attention, knowledge,
memory, evaluation and judgment. The cognition takes the help of the existing knowledge and
generate new knowledge. Different aspects are there for analyzing the processes of cognition.
The knowledge of the brain functions can inform the knowledge of the cognitive
processes. The connection in between the brain and the mind is a very important scientific
question as well as philosophical questions. Actually the knowledge of brain is the only thing
which determine the cognitive processes (Abelson & Rosenberg, 2017). The activity of the brain
can be described by the thermodynamic terms and the cognitive processes. So it is quite obvious
that the knowledge of brain functions inform the processes of cognition. Human cognition is
both conscious and unconscious, it encompasses different processes like memory, concept
formation, association, recognition of pattern, language attention, perception, solving of
problems, action and mental imagery (Berkenkotter&Huckin, 2016). Previously, emotions were
not considered as the cognitive process, but after that much researches have been done on the
cognition psychology of the emotions. Still now few peoples are there who consider that the
processes of cognition are not the function of the brain, the cognitive theory actually do not
urgently make references to the brain or to the biological processes. It can completely describe
the behavior according to the information flow or the functions.
Computation in the cognition plays a very important role as the computational cognition
is the computational basis of learning and also inference by mathematical modeling, experiments
involving the behavior and the computer simulation. This is an approach which do the
development of the computational models based on the different results of the experiments. It

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serves as the basis behind the human methods of processing the information. The computation
serves different functions in the cognition (Müller & Hoffmann, 2017). The symbolic or the
digital computation helps in explaining the cognition, the digital computation is broadly required
for giving the explanation of cognition. However some people explain that the computation of
sub-symbolic are required for giving the explanation of cognition. The extreme dynamicist
answer that actually computation is not urgently required for explaining the cognition. The
cognition is actually the symbolic computation but the computationalism of digital must not be
equated with the classicism. The computationalism exists from the digital computation to generic
computation but the connectionism which was previously criticized much for becomming non-
computational can now be constructed as either analogue or digital computation (Endert et al.,
2015).
The multiple memory system has been based on the theory that various types of
information are stored in multiple areas of the brain. The neural activity which is originating in
the external and the internal receptors flow through different several parallel systems, each of the
which are specialized in the extraction of different types of information through the ongoing
activity. Each of the systems have a central structure and the functions of the systems are
completely independent of the other. The interactions in between the systems occur at the levels
of their inputs while they are coming from different sources. The neuropsychological data
provides a very strong support in the matter of the existence of the multiple memory systems.
Till now much researches are done on the short time and the long time memory (Doll,
Shohamy&Daw, 2015). Much have been discussed till now about the distinctions of the short
time and the long time memory. Some people even argued that the whole concept of the long
term memory actually misleads as this fails to differentiate in between the episodic memory and

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the sedantic memory. Not all patients show the multiple memory system. The independent and
the selective impairment of the multiple memory system having individual structural and
functional properties is recorded in patients suffering from cerebral lesions and also in patients
having evidences of impairment for such systems. It is argued that the organization of the short
term memory, long term memory and the long term sementic memory is highly differentiated.
The differences in kinds as well as extents are very important for the multiple memory system
theory. Each of the systems should be considered from the points of its capacities, the temporal
properties and also the code of the central representation (Sinclair, Thomas & Wright, 2016).
The cognitive theories of reasoning or the psychology of reasoning is the study about
how people do the reasoning of some matter or some questions and also bring the conclusions in
informing the people how people solve problems and also take decisions. The psychosocial
experiments about how humans and other animal reasons has been carried our since 100 years.
The cognitive neurologists wanted to have data which can be reasonably argue with specifically
in favor of the particularly one proposal about the functions of the architectures at the expense
of the competing proposals. Suppose a patient suffering from stroke is seen whose recognition of
the stimuli in the all directions are perfect and also he is not at all blind but at the same time he
cannot recognize faces of different persons, even though he can recognize other objects kept
around. So it can be said that the person has problems in recognition of faces but not at
recognition of objects. No methods of science is there, which can be inferred from data which are
completely free from doubts (Norvig, 2017). However, no intrinsic weaknesses are there and so
perfect reasonable inferences can be inferred. According to the researches done till now, it can be
said that the everyday reasoning, the theories of reasoning, the proper development of reasoning,
the different sorts of reasoning, judgment and reasoning are all dependent on the psychology of

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the person or are dependent on how the brain interprets. The neuropsychological data provided
us with evidences that several alternatives theories are there for the cognitive processes upon
which the human reasoning is based. One logic is that most of the people are dependent on the
mental logic made up of formal rules of inferences and also those which are similar to the
logicians. Another view is that people are dependent on the domain specific or the content
specific rules of the inference. Another controversial issue is that the identification of the
competence model is not appropriate.
In 1960s, Noam Chomsky had proposed a revolutionary idea, which states that human
beings normally born with the knowledge of grammar which only serves as the basis of the
acquisition of languages. The most accepted viewpoint on the acquisition of languages suggest
that human beings normally learn languages by observing and memorizing the grammatical
issues (Yang, 2018). The theory says that the proper understanding of the languages are build up
solely on the experiences and not on the processing features of the internal languages. Different
theories and approaches have been evolved to study the language acquisition. Apart from the
Chomsky’s theory the other important ones are Wilburg theory and the Sassonian theory (Wei,
2017).
This assignment is about the cognition science and various aspects related with cognition.
The brain is the central organ which co-ordinates with the different processes of cognition. The
computation of the cognition is one of the important factor, determining the type of the
cognition. The multiple memory system is an important factor determining the cognition of a
person. The way language development occurs in a child are also factors of cognition.

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References
Abelson, R. P., & Rosenberg, M. J. (2017). Symbolic psycho-logic: A model of attitudinal
cognition. In Attitude Change (pp. 86-115). Routledge.
Berkenkotter, C., &Huckin, T. N. (2016). Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication:
Cognition/culture/power. Routledge.
Doll, B. B., Shohamy, D., &Daw, N. D. (2015). Multiple memory systems as substrates for
multiple decision systems. Neurobiology of learning and memory, 117, 4-13.
Endert, A., Chang, R., North, C., & Zhou, M. (2015). Semantic interaction: Coupling cognition
and computation through usable interactive analytics. IEEE Computer Graphics and
Applications, 35(4), 94-99.
Müller, V. C., & Hoffmann, M. (2017). What is morphological computation? On how the body
contributes to cognition and control. Artificial life, 23(1), 1-24.
Norvig, P. (2017). On Chomsky and the two cultures of statistical learning. In Berechenbarkeit
der Welt? (pp. 61-83). Springer VS, Wiesbaden.
Sinclair, A. W., Thomas, N. J., & Wright, B. (2016). U.S. Patent No. 9,465,731. Washington,
DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Wei, L. (2017). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied linguistics, 39(1), 9-
30.
Yang, C. (2018). A formalist perspective on language acquisition. Linguistic Approaches to
Bilingualism, 8(6), 665-706.