Week 1. Cognitive Processes
Introduction
Cognitive processes, like other processes, have a productive nature, transforming information to create newer and more organized or stable states. We receive information from the world or through retrieval from our memory, whenever we interact with the environment or try to make sense of what has already happened to us, here we call it sensation and perception. While sensation is extraction and classification of objects, the perception is their reconstruction and reorganization. Some argue that we don’t have any direct experience, all we have is an active inference or clever guess to interpret incoming stimuli. Here, we simply assume that only incomplete or inconsistent stimuli are interpreted and reconstructed while most stimuli are represented straightforwardly and connected to previous experiences or representations. Cognitive processes vary from perception of stimuli that captures our attention to control of our thoughts, i.e., cognition over cognition (the so-called metacognition), however they have overlap and interdependence. For example, decision making depends on perception and problem solving depends on both, and most of them depend on attention and memory. The study of cognitive processes are not only beneficial to cognitive science and its neibouring fields but also to many other disciplines, such as neuropsychology, BCI, neurophysiology, medicine, ergonomy, and especially mental health (Figure 1).
