The (very) basics of cognitive science

How Learning works

Before we get into what happens in the human mind when learning occurs, it’s important to define what the enigmatic term–learning–means. Learning means the acquisition of knowledge, a skill, or a metacognitive process (like how to solve a certain type of problem.)  If we could make the process of knowledge acquisition simple, it would look like this:

In reality the cognitive processes are much more circuitous and influenced by the context of the learning task. While much of this process seems instantaneous, our minds bounce back and forth between memory probes and cognitive equilibrium, all mediated by executive control.

We manage familiar or simple inputs fairly automatically.  We can also automatically recall familiar, and simple pieces of information.  However,  this process wasn’t always automatic.  We had to, overtime, build cognitive networks for integrating novel inputs.

If you’ve ever seen a baby staring at their hands in fascination, you’ve seen the process of trying to understand the concept of  “hand,” the “function of hand,” and “how this hand relates to me.”   The baby’s cognition is deliberate and effortful and the baby’s full attention, or executive control, is dedicated to building the cognitive network for “hand.”

If you really stop and look at a hand like a baby might, you’ll see “hand” is a rather complex set of inputs.  At first, a the baby tries to make sense of each input independently, but not for long.The baby creates a cognitive cluster, or network, of  inputs.  That’s critical.  Efficient integration and recall of knolwedge depend on information being networked together.

The students in 103 and 104 are novices in the discipline of physics.  While their cognitive networks are much more developed than a tiny baby, they are approaching this new content in much the same way a baby learns about “hand,” whereas the course instructors and TA’s are relative experts in elementary physics.  That can create something called the novice/expert divide, which will be addressed in the next section.