When you stub your toe, you feel pain.

But that's not all to the story: information about

what your toe is feeling has to travel up to your brain. In this lesson, we'll look at the
process of sending information from sensory receptors to the brain.

Sensory Information
Imagine there's a house on fire, and the fire hose can't reach it. So, a bunch of people line
up and pass buckets of water from person to person to try to put out the fire.

That's kind of what happens when your body receives a message from the world around
you. For example, let's say that you stub your toe. Ouch! Your toe hits something, and the
nerves in your toe feel it. But they don't really know what it is, so they send the message
up through your body to your brain. Then your brain receives that sensory information
from your toe and says, 'Ow! That feeling is pain!'

The way we experience the world around us involves a complex system of sensory
receptors, which are cells that receive sensory information from the world around us,
other cells, and different parts of our brain. It's kind of like passing a bucket of water
from person to person, trying to get the water (or sensory information) from the fire hose
to the house.

Let's look closer at the way that sensory receptors receive, code, and transmit
information to our brains.

Reception
The first thing that happens when you stub your toe is that the sensory receptors in your
foot notice that something is different. 'Hang on a minute,' they say, 'that doesn't feel like
it usually does.' This is the process of reception: receptor cells receive sensory
information from a stimulus.

Notice the words reception, receptor and receive are all related to each other, and that's
what you should think of when you think of the first step of sensation. The cells are
receiving information.

The information that's being received is different for different receptors and scenarios.
For example, receptors in your skin might receive a message if the temperature changes
or if you begin to lose your balance. Receptors in your eyes receive messages in the form
of light waves, and those in your ears receive them in the form of sound waves.

But the bottom line is the sensory receptors get information from the world around you.
Now, those receptors are kind of dumb. They don't know what they're experiencing. The
receptors in your toe don't know if the toe is feeling pain, or being tickled, or whether it's
just touched something cold. They need to find out what is going on, so they have to send
the sensory information to the brain so that it can interpret it.

Coding
Here's the problem, though: when you stubbed your toe, the information that the
receptors got was a physical sensation. In order to get it to the brain, it needs to be in a
different form. Think of it kind of like the receptors received information in one language,
and they need to translate it into another language for the brain.
Transduction is the changing of sensory information into a message that can travel
through the body. It is the next thing that happens after reception. Again, it's kind of like
changing the message from one language to another. In linguistics, this is called
translation. Think of translation to help you remember transduction. During transduction,
sensory information is coded. There are two major types of coding that happens to a
sensory message.

Information Processing
At the very heart of cognitive psychology is the idea of information processing.
Cognitive psychology sees the individual as a processor of information, in much the same way
that a computer takes in information and follows a program to produce an output.

Basic Assumptions
The information processing approach is based on a number of assumptions, including:
(1) information made available by the environment is processed by a series of
processing systems (e.g. attention, perception, short-term memory);
(2) these processing systems transform or alter the information in systematic ways;
(3) the aim of research is to specify the processes and structures that underlie
cognitive performance;
(4) information processing in humans resembles that in computers.

Computer - Mind Analogy

The development of the computer in the 1950s and 1960s had an important influence on
psychology and was, in part, responsible for the cognitive approach becoming the dominant
approach in modern psychology (taking over from Behaviorism).
The computer gave cognitive psychologists a metaphor, or analogy, to which they could
compare human mental processing. The use of the computer as a tool for thinking how the
human mind handles information is known as the computer analogy.
Essentially, a computer codes (i.e., changes) information, stores information, uses information,
and produces an output (retrieves info). The idea of information processing was adopted by
cognitive psychologists as a model of how human thought works.
For example, the eye receives visual information and codes information into electric neural
activity which is fed back to the brain where it is “stored” and “coded”. This information is can be
used by other parts of the brain relating to mental activities such as memory, perception and
attention. The output (i.e. behavior) might be, for example, to read what you can see on a
printed page.
Hence the information processing approach characterizes thinking as the environment providing
input of data, which is then transformed by our senses. The information can be stored, retrieved
and transformed using “mental programs”, with the results being behavioral responses.
Cognitive psychology has influenced and integrated with many other approaches and areas of
study to produce, for example, social learning theory, cognitive neuropsychology and artificial
intelligence (AI).

Information Processing and Selective

Attention
When we are selectively attending to one activity, we tend to ignore other stimulation, although
our attention can be distracted by something else, like the telephone ringing or someone using
our name.
Psychologists are interested in what makes us attend to one thing rather than another (selective
attention); why we sometimes switch our attention to something that was previously unattended
(e.g. Cocktail Party Syndrome), and how many things we can attend to at the same time
(attentional capacity).
One way of conceptualizing attention is to think of humans as information processors who can
only process a limited amount of information at a time without becoming overloaded.
Broadbent and others in the 1950s adopted a model of the brain as a limited capacity
information processing system, through which external input is transmitted.

Information processing models consist of a series of stages, or boxes, which represent stages
of processing. Arrows indicate the flow of information from one stage to the next.

 Input processes are concerned with the analysis of the stimuli.

 Storage processes cover everything that happens to stimuli internally in the brain and
can include coding and manipulation of the stimuli.
 Output processes are responsible for preparing an appropriate response to a stimulus.
5 Factors Influencing Memory Process

Our memory is undoubtedly one of our most fascinating faculties. It allows

us to store information, to reason, to understand, and of course to learn!
You may have already noticed that its performance is not always constant,
that it can vary from one time of day to another, from one context to
another. This is because certain factors can influence the functioning of
this highly complex brain function, as we have discussed in a previous
article.

Here are 5 factors that can influence the functioning of the memory:

1. The degree of attention, vigilance, awakening and concentration.

2. Interest, motivation, need or necessity.
3. The emotional state and emotional value attributed to the material to be
memorized.
4. The environment in which the memorization takes place (location, lighting,
noise, odours, etc.), recorded simultaneously with the data to be stored.
5. Breathing… yes yes yes!

Elements Of Information Processing

Humans receive information with their senses: sounds through hearing;
images and text through sight; shape, temperature, and affection through
touch; and odours through smell. To interpret the signals received from the
senses, humans have developed and learned complex systems of languages
consisting of “alphabets” of symbols and stimuli and the associated rules of
usage. This has enabled them to recognize the objects they see, understand the
messages they read or hear, and comprehend the signs received through
the tactile and olfactory senses.

The carriers of information-conveying signs received by the senses are energy

phenomena—audio waves, light waves, and chemical and electrochemical
stimuli. In engineering parlance, humans are receptors of analog signals; and,
by a somewhat loose convention, the messages conveyed via these carriers are
called analog-form information, or simply analog information. Until the
development of the digital computer, cognitive information was stored and
processed only in analog form, basically through the technologies of printing,
photography, and telephony.

Although humans are adept at processing information stored in their

memories, analog information stored external to the mind is not processed
easily. Modern information technology greatly facilitates the manipulation of
externally stored information as a result of its representation as digital signals
—i.e., as the presence or absence of energy (electricity, light, or magnetism).
Information represented digitally in two-state, or binary, form is often
referred to as digital information. Modern information systems are
characterized by extensive metamorphoses of analog and digital information.
With respect to information storage and communication, the transition from
analog to digital information is so pervasive as to bring a historic
transformation of the manner in which humans create, access, and use
information.

Acquisition and recording of information in analog form

The principal categories of information sources useful in modern information

systems are text, video, and voice. One of the first ways in which prehistoric
humans communicated was by sound; sounds represented concepts such as
pleasure, anger, and fear, as well as objects of the surrounding environment,
including food and tools. Sounds assumed their meaning by convention—
namely, by the use to which they were consistently put. Combining parts of
sound allowed representation of more complex concepts and gradually led to
the development of speech and eventually to spoken “natural” languages.

For information to be communicated broadly, it needs to be stored external to

human memory; because accumulation of human experience, knowledge, and
learning would be severely limited without such storage, the development
of writing systems was made necessary.

Civilization can be traced to the time when humans began to associate abstract shapes
with concepts and with the sounds of speech that represented them. Early recorded
representations were those of visually perceived objects and events, as, for example, the
animals and activities depicted in Paleolithic cave drawings. The evolution of writing
systems proceeded through the early development of pictographic languages, in which a
symbol would represent an entire concept. Such symbols would go through many
metamorphoses of shape in which the resemblance between each symbol and the object
it stood for gradually disappeared, but its semantic meaning would become more
precise. As the conceptual world of humans became larger, the symbols,
called ideographs, grew in number. Modern Chinese, a present-day result of this
evolutionary direction of a pictographic writing system, has upwards of 50,000
ideographs.

At some point in the evolution of written languages, the method of representation

shifted from the pictographic to the phonetic: speech sounds began to be represented by
an alphabet of graphic symbols. Combinations of a relatively small set of such symbols
could stand for more complex concepts as words, phrases, and sentences.
The invention of the written phonetic alphabet is thought to have taken place during the
2nd millennium BC. The pragmatic advantages of alphabetic writing systems over the
pictographic became apparent twice in the past millennium: after the invention of the
movable-type printing press in the 15th century and again with the development of
information processing by electronic means since the mid-1940s.

From the time early humans learned to represent concepts symbolically, they used
whatever materials were readily available in nature for recording. The
Sumerian cuneiform, a wedge-shaped writing system, was impressed by a stylus into
soft clay tablets, which were subsequently hardened by drying in the sun or the oven.
The earliest Chinese writing, dating to the 2nd millennium BC, is preserved on animal
bone and shell, while early writing in India was done on palm leaves and birch bark.
Applications of technology yielded other materials for writing. The Chinese had
recorded their pictographs on silk, using brushes made from animal hair, long before
they invented paper. The Egyptians first wrote on cotton, but they began
using papyrus sheets and rolls made from the fibrous lining of the papyrus plant during
the 4th millennium BC. The reed brush and a palette of ink were the implements with
which they wrote hieroglyphic script. Writing on parchment, a material that was
superior to papyrus and was made from the prepared skins of animals, became
commonplace about 200 BC, some 300 years after its first recorded use, and the
quill pen replaced the reed brush. By the 4th century AD, parchment came to be the
principal writing material in Europe.

Paper was invented in China at the beginning of the 2nd century AD, and for some 600
years its use was confined to East Asia. In AD 751 Arab and Chinese armies clashed at the
Battle of Talas, near Samarkand; among the Chinese taken captive were some
papermakers from whom the Arabs learned the techniques. From the 7th century on,
paper became the dominant writing material of the Islamic world. Papermaking finally
reached Spain and Sicily in the 12th century, and it took another three centuries before
it was practiced in Germany.

With the invention of printing from movable type, typesetting became the standard
method of creating copy. Typesetting was an entirely manual operation until the
adoption of a typewriter-like keyboard in the 19th century. In fact, it was
the typewriter that mechanized the process of recording original text. Although the
typewriter was invented during the early 18th century in England, the first practical
version, constructed by the American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes, did not
appear until 1867. The mechanical typewriter finally found wide use after World War I.
Today its electronic variant, the computer video terminal, is used pervasively to record
original text.

Recording of original nontextual (image) information was a manual process until the
development of photography during the early decades of the 19th century; drawing and
carving were the principal early means of recording graphics. Other techniques were
developed alongside printing—for example, etching in stone and metal. The invention of
film and the photographic process added a new dimension to information acquisition:
for the first time, complex visual images of the real world could be captured accurately.
Photography provided a method of storing information in less space and more
accurately than was previously possible with narrative information.

During the 20th century, versatile electromagnetic media opened up new possibilities
for capturing original analog information. Magnetic audio tape is used to capture speech
and music, and magnetic videotape provides a low-cost medium for recording analog
voice and video signals directly and simultaneously. Magnetic technology has other uses
in the direct recording of analog information, including alphanumerics. Magnetic
characters, bar codes, and special marks are printed on checks, labels, and forms for
subsequent sensing by magnetic or optical readers and conversion to digital form.
Banks, educational institutions, and the retail industry rely heavily on this technology.
Nonetheless, paper and film continue to be the dominant media for direct storage of
textual and visual information in analog form.