The Principles of Information Processing

Information Processing is how individuals perceive, analyze, manipulate, use, and remember information. Unlike Piaget’s theory, this approach proposes that cognitive 10 | P a g e development is ongoing and gradual, not organized into distinct stages. The areas of basic cognitive changes generally occur in five areas: Attention. Improvements are seen in selective attention(the process by which one focuses on one stimulus while tuning out another), as well as divided attention (the ability to pay attention to two or more stimuli at the same time).

MPC 001 Solved Assignment 2021-22: Memory. Improvements are seen in working memory and long-term memory. Processing Speed. With maturation, children think more quickly. Processing speed improves sharply between age five and middle adolescence, levels off around age 15, and does not appear to change between late adolescence and adulthood. Organization of Thinking. As children mature, they are more planful, they approach problems with strategy, and are flexible in using different strategies in different situations. Metacognition. Older children can think about thinking itself.

This often involves monitoring one’s own cognitive activity during the thinking process. Metacognitionprovides the ability to plan ahead, see the future consequences of an action, and provide alternative explanations of events. Changes in attention have been described by many as the key to changes in human memory (Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Posner & Rothbart, 2007). However, attention is not a unified function; it is comprised of sub-processes. Our ability to focus on a single task or stimulus while ignoring distracting information, called selective attention.

MPC 001 Solved Assignment 2021-22: There is a sharp improvement in selective attention from age six into adolescence (Vakil, Blachstein, Sheinman, & Greenstein, 2009). Sustained attention is the ability to stay on task for long periods. The ability to switch our focus between tasks or external stimuli is called divided attention or multitasking, which also improves into adolescence (Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja, 2013). According to Huitt (2003), there are a few basic principles that most cognitive psychologists agree with:

MPC 001 Solved Assignment 2021-22: The mental system has limited capacities, i.e. bottlenecks in the flow and processing of information, occur at very specific points A control mechanism is required to oversee the encoding, transformation, processing, storage, retrieval and utilization of information. This control mechanism requires itself processing power and that varies in function of the difficulty of the task. 11 | P a g e There is a two-way flow of information. Sensory input is combined with information stored in memory in order to construct meaning. The human organism has been genetically prepared to process and organize information in specific ways.

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