Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that studies our ideas and how they relate to our experiences and actions. Clark (1995) describes the cognitive model as a theoretical viewpoint on cognition and mental activities that provides explanations for visible events as well as future predictions. People continually generate and access internal representations (models) of what they perceive in the world for the purposes of perception, cognition, and behavior choices (action). Perception, attention, and memory are all involved in decision-making. In real-life situations, you’ll have to make a sequence of judgments, each of which is based on past feedback from a constantly changing environment. Perception gives us the capacity to comprehend our environment based on the stimulus received by our human senses. Attention is a natural element that may be utilized to deliberately focus on some relevant information while disregarding other perceptible inputs. Memory processes, on the other hand, allow individuals to reflect on their prior experiences beyond the present environment and stimulus. These cognitive processes are a collection of chemical and electrical signals that occur in the brain and enable humans to comprehend and learn about their environment.
Neurons produce chemicals that induce electrical impulses to be formed in neighboring neurons, resulting in a barrage of signals that are perceived as unconscious and conscious thoughts. Explicit memory is content that you must deliberately try to remember, whereas implicit memory is material knowledge that you recollect naturally and easily. Implicit and explicit memory describe the various brain functions and levels of knowledge of human long-term memory. Explicit memory refers to the mental recollection of prior knowledge and experience, whereas implicit memory is spontaneous and subconscious. Explicit memory degrades in the lacking of recall, whereas implicit memory is more robust and can last a long period even without additional practice.
We come into contact with a wide range of information throughout our daily lives. Simple visual pictures, aural signals, tastes, and scents, as well as more complicated experiences such as discussions, making a meal, or navigating a path to a new area, are all examples of sensory input. The capacity to retain, hold on to, and recall information is referred to as memory. The Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch model of the working memory was produced in 1974, in an attempt to develop a more exact model of a short-term memory theory. Baddeley and Hitch (1974), state that the Multi-Store model’s representation of short-term memory (STM) is far too basic for use and only holds a little amount of data for a brief period of time and decodes too little of it as in accordance with the Multi-Store Model. It is once-in-a-lifetime system. This implies that the system is devoid of sub-systems or storage. The working memory, on the other hand, is a system that engages the use of both auditory and visual capabilities. Furthermore, it can function to store and process information, but short-term memory can only just store it. The multi-component model of working memory illustrates that a working memory buffer is an important element for innovation and creativity (Baddeley, 2003). According to the dual-route hypothesis, activating moods rather than suppressing them increases working memory capacity, allowing for more cognitive flexibility. Positive emotions may also act as a retrieval cue for positive content in memory, leading to different interpretations and ways of structuring information in memory, and therefore promoting creative thinking. Furthermore, according to the cognitive network model of creativity, the degree to which previously distant frames become saliently related with one another through problem-solving is a consequence of the creative solution. The frame is the smallest piece of information that may be kept in memory. They are salient when they occupy short-term memory; they are related when two or more frames are prominent at the same time. Cognitive load and the intricacy of issue frames impact the association of distant frames. When people employ many salient frames at the same time or use fragmented frames to describe an issue, the cognitive load may be high, reducing the likelihood of merging distant frames and resulting in less innovative solutions. When people chunk an issue into a more complicated frame, however, the cognitive load may be lowered, resulting in more efficient short-term memory processing and, in turn, more creative solutions.
Allan Baddeley’s working memory model suggests that each element has a fixed capacity and is mostly, if not entirely, independent of the others. Baddeley’s model in the beginning had three parts which are the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and a central executive element. The episodic buffer is, nevertheless, incorporated in the current model as a fourth element which was later added to the model. The phonological loop is in control of analyzing sounds and supplying speech-based data. This includes noises that one’s mind has processed. For example, the phonological loop is used to acquire new words, resolve tasks, solve mathematical problems, and retain instructions. The phonological loop is used to process sounds in all of these tasks and activities. Its storage and articulatory control process are the two halves of the phonological loop. The information is stored in the phonological storage for 1.5-2 seconds. The information stored in the phonological storage is refreshed by the articulatory control process and also turns written content into phonological code. This will then allow the phonological storage to register it. The evidence for the phonological loop are the effects of phonological similarity, word length, articulatory suppression, and irrelevant speech are all investigated. In this context, the phonological similarity has an effect where the listing of words that sound similar are more difficult to recall than lists of words that sound distinct. Semantic similarity has a negligible effect, suggesting that linguistic information is mostly recorded phonologically in working memory. The word length effect illustrates that people recall short word lists better than big word lists. This is due to the fact that smaller words can be spoken more quickly, allowing for the quiet articulation of more words before they decay. The model implies that the phonological loop can keep track of lists of words (or other verbal information) as long as the articulation time is less than 2 seconds. The impact of articulatory suppression occurs when people are prompted to utter something unrelated loudly, their memory for verbal data is harmed. The articulatory rehearsal process is thought to be blocked, leaving memory traces in the phonological loop to fade. Irrelevant discourse also has an effect. Even in a foreign language, playing speech sounds affects recall for spoken data. This may be explained by supposing that speech sounds are automatically stored in the phonological storage and interfere with memory traces of the list to be recalled.
The visuo-spatial sketchpad has the responsibility of processing visual and spatial information. It can be supplied either actively or passively, through perception or a visual picture. People may save photographs of items and their locations using the visuo-spatial sketchpad. In addition to navigation, the sketchpad is employed. It is the visuo-spatial sketchpad that is activated when a person moves from one area to another. It is also triggered by puzzles, mazes, and games, among other things. The sketchpad is made up of two components. Color and visual form data are saved in the visual cache. The inner scribe rehearses data from the visual cache and sends it to the central executive. For example, while trying to assess if a collie dog’s ears are loose or pointed, depicting the journey from the railway station to home, or envisioning a structure that an engineer is designing. It has been shown that spatial pursuits, such as driving a vehicle, can impair spatial awareness, but solely visual activities, such as viewing a series of images or color patterns, can impair the ability to comprehend images or shapes. These findings, along with the discovery that some brain-damaged people only have one of the two abnormalities, suggest that knowledge about space and data about objects and their visual characteristics may be stored separately.
The Central Executive is thought to be a limited-processing-capacity attentional control system that is in charge of action control. Norman and Shallice (1986) provided a paradigm in which activities are regulated in two ways, which Baddeley (1986) accepted. Routine and habitual behavior is guided by a set of schemas, or well-learned procedures that allow us to respond correctly to our surroundings. A skilled driver on a typical trip, for example, may arrive at the destination with no recollection of the route. When such approaches fail, such as identifying a familiar passage that has been blocked by an occurrence, a second mechanism called the Supervisory Attentional System (SAS), is triggered. This is competent of using long-term knowledge to build up and consider various possibilities before deciding on the best one. In our interrupted voyage, the central executive of working memory, most probably in combination with LTM, the visuospatial sketchpad, and perhaps the phonological loop, might well be implicated. Originally, the central executive was envisioned as a general system that is capable of both processing and storage. For the sake of straightforwardness, Baddeley and Logie (1999) asserted that it only possessed a selective attention capability. Although the term “central executive” could refer to a single cohesive control system, it is more inclined to refer to a group of executive control procedures that include the ability to focus attention, divide attention between two or more tasks, and gain access to long-term memory, presumably via one or more kinds of inhibitory activity. Shallice (2002) has done substantial research on executive functioning, particularly in regard to its impairment following frontal brain damage, a chronic condition as a dysexecutive syndrome. This can lead to major attentional control concerns, such as the inability to maintain a purpose in the face of interruption while continuously focused on a particular task. When inappropriate connections are employed to remember a recollection, this can lead to delusional thinking, which results in wholly erroneous recollections (Baddeley & Wilson, 1986).
The first three-component model of the working memory faced some complications when it came to accounting for how the various subsystems may interact with one another, particularly with long-term memory. To overcome this problem, Baddeley (2000) introduced a fourth component called the episodic buffer. This was considered to be a low-capacity transient store that might integrate a number of storage features, allowing it to gather data from the visual, visuospatial, and verbal subsystems, as well as long-term memory. It was anticipated that it would do so by describing them as multiple chunks or episodes that could be accessed by conscious consciousness. The findings that some (primarily exceedingly bright) patients with amnesia, despite having no capabilities to encode new understanding in long-term memory, possess excellent short-term recall of stories, recounting much more details than the phonological loop could retain, was the primary motivation for including this component.
Case Study and the Proposed Policy
Consider a situation in Africa where schools have been having many students than they can manage. Therefore in an aim to address this matter, parents and teachers sat down and wrote to the government to engage them in the implementation of more classes in order to facilitate learning. On the other hand, the government was launching a new regulation that will be used to facilitate secondary school learning by ensuring that parents pay an extra amount of school fees to enable the construction of a school playground. The government is doing this in order to promote sporting activities in schools after realizing that most students perform well in extra curriculum activities. In a move to do this, parents have been issued a memo stating these changes in the school fee invoices. One month later, parents and teachers held an annual meeting and this matter was raised up by parents. They argued that the school fee was too high yet they had challenges in learning facilities therefore this was not a priority for them. The government, therefore, issued another publication stating that it has first halted the program to engage more sporting grounds in schools and has instead funded schools with the money which was to be used to fund sporting. Additionally, the government has allowed teachers to sit down with the parents and agree on the amounts they can chip in to foster more growth in schools. In this case study, we shall investigate Baddeley and Hitch’s model and how it affects this policy-making move by the government.
Interaction between the cognitive principle and the impact of policy
To start with, the cognitive concepts are the driving and regulating rules that control cognitive functioning. They operate on both the inside and outside of cognitive factors (perception, language, etc.). The concept of economy, which argues that the greatest amount of benefit may be obtained with the least amount of cognitive effort, is the most fundamental of these notions.
Push Factors
The concepts of cognitive learning place a greater emphasis on what you know instead of how you react to events. You act on your mental processes and link them to your memories when you utilize a cognitive learning principle, rather than merely reacting to what is going on around you or how you are feeling. The government in this case study concentrates on the facts at hand and uses them to develop a policy to address the problem. In the implementation of this policy, the following push factors were observed;
- One factor is that the policy implementation goes hand in hand with the cognitivism of the people and the policymaking. This is because the people perceived that the schools have been having challenges in managing the many students registering for studies in schools and kept that for a short term in their memories before they made a move to address this matter by writing to the government. This shows the relationship between the perceptiveness of the people, the working memory they engaged in, and how their behaviors have influenced the policy-making of the government.
- Secondly, these cognitive principles of the people will positively affect the policy since the behavior of the community towards the policy will be friendly. This is due to the fact that the social problem the community is experiencing will be positively impacted by the policy. The new policy set by the government will enable facilitate more development in schools and also in the future, the schools shall expound on their sporting activities in an aim to facilitate sporting talents.
- The concepts of cognitive learning focus a strong emphasis on structure. They put a priority on order and relationships. The consequence is more effective learning when you “make that connection” between your new information and your past information. Through this, the government will focus on giving the people more civic education on what this policy is coming to introduce to that area, how to handle and also embrace the change.
- The social cognition of the people will be affected by the implementation of this policy. This may be observed in situations where the cry of the people to a social problem they are experiencing, may go viral and be heard by the whole world. This will therefore reach out to other large organizations like the UN, who will donate more funds for the establishment of learning facilities in schools.
Pull Factors
One negative impact is that the policy implemented shall only focus on the learner’s side but not on how a similar move might make an impact on the teachers and the parents. This is because many parents have been having challenges of paying school fees in the near past. This move, therefore, makes them get more stressed about where to get more money to facilitate learning. This move may therefore lead to dropping out of some students after fee arrears pile up.
- Another factor is that this policy does not handle the mental and emotional disorders that may arise if the policy is not implemented perfectly. Suppose the policy made is not accepted by the parents. Or suppose the students feel like they need the sporting activities implemented first. This might make the students be rebellious or the parents cease paying the extra funds making the policy made by the government ineffective. This will be observed through the relationship of the vision, behavior, and memory retention as illustrated in Baddeley and Hitch’s model
Conclusion
The working memory model was created to explain how humans handle and recall various information in the short term during ordinary thinking and learning activities. The phonological loop is accountable for maintaining speech material for short periods of time; the visuospatial sketchpad is illustrated as an instrument for storing visual, contextual, and possibly kinesthetic learning information for short periods of time; the central executive is accountable for the overall regulation of the working memory system via flexible concentrating, separating, and shifting attention; and the episodic buffer is essential for the formation or integrating information. This third component also assists us in making sense of conscious experience by helping us to combine long-term information with present experience. Throughout the last four decades, the working memory model has had a huge influence on cognitive psychology, influencing a huge amount of research on memory growth of children with regular and abnormal growth. The major role of the Baddeley and Hitch model in a successful governmental or NGO policy intervention to solve a social issue has been demonstrated in this chapter.
References
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