1. Cognition
• Definitions- the duality of its
origins
• Can We define the concept
comprehensively?
• Webster- Latin and Greek roots
• L cognitio, fr. Cognoscere,
cognitum, to become aquainted
with,to know
• Greek – gnosis, knowledge, the act
of knowing,knowledge,perception

2. • Duality of process and product.
• Cognition is what people do and also
cognition is a mental representation that
emerges in consciousness, when we
perceive, reason, form a mental image.
• Ulrich Neisser – cognition is the activity
of knowing, the acquisition,
organization, and use of knowledge.
• All dictionaries state the duality of the
process and the content /product and
also add the term ‘mental’ -thus
cognition is the mental process by which
external or internal input is transformed,
reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered
and used.

3. • The Conceptual history became
more murky with Kant’s
‘copernican’ debate on subjectivity
in experience and the question of
identity between the Image and the
object.
• He brought in the trancendental
processes of synthesis, and
ordering, based on a-priori
categories of the mind.
• The debate stretched into the
innate vs acquired knowledge and

4. • The shift from the ongoing debate was
a result of two events• Darwinian notions of evolution, and
• the development of the computer models of
Artificial Intelligence. Distinctions between
Hardware and the Soft ware of knowing.
• Cognition was now regarded an adaptive
facility, and could be innate as well as
acquired in the process of the growing
organism interacting with the environment.
• There was also a developmental perspective
to cognition as strategies and schemas
changed with age and maturity- Piaget,
Vygotsky,

5. • A multi dimensional perspective is the only way of
understanding this complex concept, as the
computer analogy is not sufficient to account for
the processes of insight, awareness and cognition
of Self. [Marr 1982]
• An imp research area is that of “Mental
Representations” this includes debates on
definition of Format and the organization of the
content
• Language is the central scaffolding of Cog.
(Wittgenstein).
• Grain of thought is finer than that of a persons
potential linguistic vocabulary.
• There is an inner propositional representation
system that is more adequate than the natural
language.
• The research question is to understand the
structure and the Format of these visual- spatial
representations

6. Research themes and
Debates
• The functional role of mental images and of
visual-spatial representations in Memory
[Cooper and Lang, 1996].
• Paivio’s dual coding theory-verbal system,
regarded as more abstract and a logical mode
of representation and the Imagery system, a
more concrete and analogical mode of
representation. Both are independent but
interconnected. How cognitive
representations can both exceed and yet be
influenced by language.
• The notion of representations as mediating
states!
• Thus the debate about the nature of cognition
is lively and productive.

7. Themes
• Memory models and levels of processing,
Atkinson and Shiffrin- Multi store approach VS
Craig and Lockhart- levels of Processing model.
• Problem Solving and Artificial Intelligence.
• Pattern Recognition and Robotology.
• Cognitive Development
• Social Cognition
• Cognitive psychology places Psychology firmly in
the interdisciplinary field by the shear variety and
scope of research in this area

8. Cognitive Revolution- Salient
features
• Cog. Rev. represents a dramatic turn in the
centuries old treatment of the mind and
consciousness.
• Subjective mental states are recognized as
functionally interactive and essential for
explaining conscious beh.
• The assumption that brain functioning can
be fully accounted for in terms of the
neurocellular-physicochemical terms is
refuted.
• Cognitive-consciouness rev. also refutes the

9. The new mentalism
• The new mentalism is not mentalistic dualism.
• The new position states that behavior is
mentally and subjectively driven.
• This position is synthetic as it views mental
states as the dynamic emergent properties of
brain activity. Consciousness therefore cannot
exist apart from the functioning brain. A new
reciprocal form of causal control that includes
down-ward and upward determinism.
• Bi-directional model portrays the control of the
emergent mental over the neuronal in the brain

10. • The cognitive revolution involves a
transformation in the core concepts
Consciousness and Causality.
• The turnabout in assigning a causal status to
Consciousness abolishes the older Science
-morals/values dichotomy.
• Subjective human values are now not just
epiphenomena nor reduced to micro
phenomena, they are valued as emergent
macro holistic properties in both human and
nonhuman nature
• The new cognitivism retains both free will and