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Learning and Cognition

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Learning and Cognition
Mellissa Trevino
PSY/390
February 12, 2013
Laura Mueller, Psy.D.

Learning and Cognition
People acquire knowledge, skills and behaviors through learning and process information acquired via the methodology of cognition; mental functions and processes. Cognition helps process information acquired using different parts of the brain (Snowling & Humle, 2009). This makes it easy for the learner to understand what he has learned and demonstrate it by displaying various behaviors. For example, students learn how to perform scientific experiments through observation (Snowling & Humle, 2009). Cognitive views of learning tend to see the learner as socially interactive, and influenced by mediating influences such as perceptions, expectations, motives, and feelings. The learner is intrinsically motivated to make sense of their environment and views the world qualitatively and quantitatively differently at each stage of cognitive development. For example, a teenager may learn how to balance a checkbook by watching her parents but will not practice that behavior until she gets her own checking account. Learning is a term associated with behaviorism whereas cognition emphasis on the nature of the mental representation and the mental encoding and retrieval processes involved. Humans have the capacity to learn whereas learning is the process for cognition.
Most human behavior is learned; therefore, understanding the main reasons as to how we learn may give us more insight as to why we behave the way we do. There are many definitions out there for learning within the behavioral science world. Experts seem to define learning in different ways. Psychologists seem to refer to definitions of learning that relate closely to observational types of behavior. Learning can be defined as potential changes in behavior that is learned from our experience to

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