Models of Information

Abstract

Cognition as a psychological area of study goes far beyond simply the taking in and retrieving information. Neisser (1967), one of the most influential researchers in cognition, defined it as the study of how people encode, structure, store, retrieve, use or otherwise learn knowledge. The information processing approach to human cognition remains very popular in the field of psychology. Information processing is the change (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an observer. Within the field of cognitive psychology, information processing is an approach to the goal of understanding human thinking. It arose in the 1940s and 1950s. The essence of the approach is to see cognition as being essentially computational in nature, with mind being the software and the brain being the hardware. One of the primary areas of cognition studied by researches is memory. By the 1960s research in memory had reached a high state of activity, and it was about this time that some formalised comprehensive theories of memory were beginning to be formulated. There are many hypotheses and suggestions as to how this integration occurs, and many new theories have built upon established beliefs in this area. Currently, there is widespread consensus on several aspects of information processing; however, there are many dissentions in reference to specifics on how the brain actually codes or manipulates information as it is stored in memory. This section considers a few of the more viable memory theories of that time.