what is cognitive thinking?

-- bob charlie (adam_gray90@hotmail.com), April 26, 2004

Answers

Hi Bob, I am not an expert on cognitive psychology, but I will share my views. Psychology has inherited a centuries old tradition of dividing mental processing into the following three categories: cognition (thinking or information processing), conation (something like motivation or will), and emotion. These three conceptual categories have been useful to psychology, but may sometimes lead us to oversimplified views of our mental life. One problem is that in the real world it seems that these processes are often or always interrelated at the brain, behavioral, or conscious levels. For example, while some parts of the brain may be particularly related to one of these conceptual categories, there is considerable interaction and interdependance within the brain. Related to this interaction issue is the question of whether cognition should refer to any type of information processing, or just those not dealing directly with emotion or motivation. In the real world emotion typically has a stong and often underrecognized effects on our thoughts and decision making. Another issue is whether you want to use cognition to refer only to "higher" level information processing (e.g., involving meaningful sensations, images, and categories, which are often but not alway conscious), or if you want to use it to refers to all antecedent information processing, including "lower" levels of processing that are used to build up more meaning information. The very lowest levels of information processing may not only be unconscious, but of little meaning in themselves, other than representing neural facilitation, inhibition, or some type of neural interaction. On a more superficial level it might seem that the expression "cognitive thinking" is redundant. However, in the area of Animal Learning, some psychologists distinguish between cognitive learning and more basic types of learning or conditioning. Cognitive learning would refer to complex problem solving using tools like language and cognitive maps, or having the ability to appreciate at some level complex relationships (e.g., if A is greater than B and C is greater than B, then C is greater than A). I hope this helps. Paul

-- Paul Kleinginna (pkleinginna@georgiasouthern.edu), April 26, 2004.

My best friend was diagnosed with MS one year ago. Since she has two inflamations in her head - she believes that training her cognitive thinking might help her in the long run. She is currently working on her PhD and is wondering if there are any training methods she could apply as kind of a daily routine. Thank you very much for your help. Eva

-- Eva Schmiedleitner (eva.schmiedleitner@austria.info), March 09, 2005.