Describe the principles of information processing.

Principles of information processing:

Even though there are widely varying views within cognitive psychology, there is general agreement among most cognitive psychologists on some basic principles of the information processing system. 

The first is the assumption of a limited capacity of the mental system. This means that the amount of information that can be processed by the system is constrained in some very important ways. Bottlenecks, or restrictions in the flow and processing of information, occur at very specific points (e.g., Broadbent, 1975; Case, 1978).

A second principle is that a control mechanism is required to oversee the encoding, transformation, processing, storage, retrieval and utilization of information. That is, not all of the processing capacity of the system is available; an executive function that oversees this process will use up some of this capability.

When one is learning a new task or is confronted with a new environment, the executive function requires more processing power than when one is doing a routine task or is in a familiar environment.

A third principle is that there is a two-way flow of information as we try to make sense of the world around us. We constantly use information that we gather through the senses and information we have stored in memory (often called top-down processing) in a dynamic process as we construct meaning about our environment and our relations to it.

This is somewhat analogous to the difference between inductive reasoning (going from specific instances to a general conclusion) and deductive reasoning (going from a general principle to specific examples.)  A similar distinction can be made between using information we derive from the senses and that generated by our imaginations.

A fourth principle generally accepted by cognitive psychologists is that the human organism has been genetically prepared to process and organise information in specific ways. For example, a human infant is more likely to look at a human face than any other stimulus. Other research has discovered additional biological predispositions to process information.

For example, language development is similar in all human infants regardless of language spoken by adults or the area in which they live (e.g., rural versus urban, Asia versus Europe.) All human infants with normal hearing babble and coo, generate first words, begin the use of telegraphic speech (example, ball gone), and overgeneralise at approximately the same ages.

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