Cognition - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

The cognition gathers various the mental processes energy of the perceptive analysis of the environment to the driving order (while passing by the memorizing, the Raisonnement, the emotion S, the language…). This definition thus exceeds the only framework of the human cognition or Animal E but includes/understands also the processes with work in artificial Système S, as the Ordinateur S. the field of Scientific research which studies cognition in its various forms is known under the name of cognitive Sciences .

The exact definition of what is cognition and the processes which it brings into play is the object of many debates in contemporary sciences (Psychologie, Artificial intelligence, Philosophie, etc). Following the Revolution cognitivist, the dominant prospect since the middle for the 20th century gathers under the term of cognition the functions with which is equipped the human Esprit and by which we build a operational representation of the Réalité starting from our perceptions, likely in particular to nourish our reasoning and to guide our actions. Other currents of research criticize this prospect representationnalist and characterizes on the contrary cognition like a phenomenon primarily emergent Dynamique and .

Cold cognition vs. hot cognition

Based on the vision suitable for the traditional philosophy of the human being cogitans then inspired by the metaphor of the brain-computer resulting from the Artificial intelligence, the study of human cognition initially was interested in the great functions of the human spirit, like the reasoning, the memory, the language, the conscience… leaving side the Affect, the Instinct or the ethical .

However, although born from this conceptual framework, the cognitive Sciences rather quickly broke this cutting by showing the multiple interactions which there could be enters, for example, the affect and the memory, ethics and the reasoning, etc the title of the famous book of Antonio Damasio, the Error of Descartes illustrates this evolution perfectly: against Descartes (and a vision of the reasoning like properly human and detached from the other components of the man), the Neurologue opposes an approach in which emotions and reasoning interact. Indeed, the various disciplines which compose cognitive sciences showed that it was impossible to dissociate these aspects of the human behavior. Thus, in Neuropsychology, the patients suffering from a cerebral Lésion in the cortex préfrontal are unable to react correctly to an emotional situation while being perfectly able to reason in the abstract . Or, in experimental economy, it was shown that the human beings can act irrationally in situations where however the “cold” reason would order to act differently. The cognition term thus includes today a very vast whole of mental processes.

In addition, the progress carried out in the study of the animal behavior by the cognitive ethology as disputed this design of a human cognition by showing as the animals were also capable of reasoning, of memory… Contrary, this discipline - by refining our knowledge on animal cognition - made it possible to better determine cognitive faculties specific to the man. Today, this work falls under an evolutionary prospect which seeks with better including/understanding how appeared and evolved/moved these various cognitive faculties.

Artificial cognition

The progress carried out in the study of human and animal cognition quickly was the subject of transpositions partial in some information systems and in applications of Knowledge management.

The metaphor often used is that of the data processing. With an entry ( input ), an evaluation (treatment, with various stages), an answer or exit ( output ).

The “data processing” is related to at least three variables:

cognitive events: thoughts accessible easily to the Conscience;
the Perception S of reality;
cognitive diagrams: unconscious, major beliefs, experiments, and representations of the world.

Cognition located and incarnated

Reference: Andy Clark, 1997, Being There - Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again , The MIT Near.

To develop this concept, one can amongst other things refer to work of the neurobiologist Francisco Varela and his theory of the énaction. To see on this subject: The body inscription of the Spirit, cognitive Sciences and human experiment, Threshold 1993, coll the color of the ideas.

Cognitive sciences with the science of cognition

One of the consequences of these interactions multi-field within what is called cognition is to change in an important way the way in which the sets of themes of research in cognitive Sciences are organized. Those are not thus structured either only compared to the various traditional objects of study of the disciplines constitutive of this field of research (the Neuron S and the Cerveau for the mental Neurosciences, processes for psychology, the animal Comportement for the ethology, the Algorithmique and the modeling for Informatique, etc) but as often around the cognitive functions as one seeks to isolate the ones from the others. Enquiring S of several disciplines will be interested collectively, for example, with the memory or the language. This change appears in the emergence of the term: Science of the cognition which translates, or asserts, the fact that this multi-field field is on the way to constitute itself like a Science, unified and with whole share.

Elements of bibliography

Review '' Labyrinthe '', number 20 “cognition”, 2005.

See too

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