Cognitive Perspective of Learning & Information Processing

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Cognitive Perspective of Learning & Information Processing

When you see or hear something in your environment, how does your brain recognize what you are seeing or hearing? This lesson introduces the cognitive perspective in psychology, including the difference between sensation and perception. We'll also discuss the famous Gestalt principles of perception that you do automatically every day but didn't necessarily know there were names for what your brain was doing.

Introduction:

Look at this image of a famous optical illusion. What do you see here? Can you simultaneously see two things at once? If we take the visual image away, can you re-create it in your mind?

How your mind responds when a stimulus is presented in your environment is complicated, but at the same time, these complicated responses are often automatic. The cognitive perspective in psychology is an area of the field that studies how people acquire, perceive, remember and communicate information. It includes how we respond to images we see or sounds we hear, how our minds change these stimuli into meaningful ideas and how we remember these ideas later. Several lessons will discuss the ideas of the cognitive perspective in psychology. This lesson is an introduction to the foundation of the cognitive perspective, which is sensation and perception.

Sensation

We all have five senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. All five senses work because something in the environment sets off a sensory neuron in our bodies, and those neurons send a signal to the brain. So, sensation is the process of an environmental stimulus starting the chain of events from one of our five senses to our brain in order to be recognized.

Let's think about touch as an example. When something touches any part of your skin that signal sets off the end of a sensory neuron, which is a cell in your skin. The end of the cell moves slightly, which sets off an entire series of electrical and chemical signals that go all the way to your brain. All of our five senses work in basically the same way. But in the process of sensation, those signals haven't been transformed yet into recognizable ideas. That's where the next step in the process begins.

Perception

After an electrical and chemical signal has gone all the way from a sensory neuron to the brain, perception occurs. Perception is when your brain transforms sensory experiences into meaningful ideas that can be processed and understood.

For example, when something touches your skin, the process of sensation sends a signal to your brain, but perception is when you realize what just happened. What is it that touched you? Was it something gentle, like a feather? Was it something hot, burning you? What part of your body was touched? Another example of perception is with vision. On the sensation level, all that happens is that the rods and cones inside your eyeball process light and color. But on the perception level, your brain recognizes images, such as what your mother looks like compared to your cat or when you look inside your fridge to decide what to eat. Perception is when your mind decides what just happened to you, and what it means.

The sensation and perception processes occur so quickly and automatically that we don't need to consciously think about them or even realize that they're happening. When your mind does something so often that it occurs without your conscious thought process, it's called automaticity. We have automaticity for certain well-practiced motions, like how to walk or even how to drive after years of practice. We also have automaticity for sensation and perception. However, this automaticity can lead to certain interesting mistakes, as well.

For example, look again at this optical illusion. At first glance, your perception of it might be that you interpret it in one way. However, when you look at it more closely, you can realize that there's another way to see the same image. In the early 1900s, a group of psychologists decided to identify some basic ways that our minds automatically process stimuli. Typically, these tendencies help us understand the world, but sometimes they lead to interesting illusions. These psychologists are called Gestalt psychologists, and they identified several rules or principles of perception organization. The word Gestalt can be translated as essence, or sometimes people refer to the Gestalt idea using the phrase, 'The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.' The rules identified by the Gestalt psychologists are usually called the Gestalt principles of organization. Let's go over some of these rules.

Gestalt Principles of Organization

                                                                                     

Probably the most famous of the Gestalt principles or rules is one called figure/ground. Figure/ground refers to the automatic tendency we have when we see an image of trying to pick out the most important figure in the visual field and filter everything else into the background. Typically, this is relatively easy, such as when looking at paintings of flowers or fruit. We can see that the figure, or central image, of the painting is the fruit, while everything else, like the table or room behind it, is the background. However, the figure/ground principle is what causes certain famous optical illusions as well. Remember the famous image seen here? It's a perfect example of this principle because you can't tell if the figure is supposed to be the two faces looking at each other or if the figure is the vase or the candlestick in the middle. Which is the figure and which is the ground or background? The automaticity of vision and the figure/ground principle are what make this optical illusion interesting to us.

Another Gestalt principle is called similarity, and that's when we automatically group images that are similar with each other. Look at this image. What do you see? If you're like most people, you'll group the circles of one color all together and group the circles of the other color all together. So, here, you see certain shapes, like a square form. This particular example is actually what eye doctors use to test whether people are color blind. If you can't differentiate the shape in this image from the rest of the image, then you aren't able to tell the difference between the two colors of the image. The similarity principle helps us in our daily lives by making our brains very efficient in sorting through all of the individual aspects of our visual field.

The next Gestalt principle of perception that we all use every day is called closure. Closure is when our minds automatically fill in missing parts of an image, or gaps, to see the image as complete, even when it's not really. Look at this image. Does your brain automatically fill in the missing lines to create the idea of an animal? Even though some of the information is missing, our minds realize what should be there. We do this when we walk down a city street, and we see cars parked, but there are things like light posts or parking meters in front of the visual image of the car. We don't think, 'Wow! That car is in two separate pieces, chopped in half!' Instead, we simply realize that the light post or parking meter is covering up a missing part of the image, and our brains automatically fill in the missing piece. Or, imagine that you're in a jungle, and you see a snake wrapped around a tree branch. You realize that the parts of the snake that are on the far side of the tree branch are not viewable, but your brain knows that they're still there.

Another principle of perception that we use automatically is called proximity, which is the automatic tendency to group images that are close to each other. Think about the night sky. Do you recognize images like the big dipper or Orion? The reason we see constellations in the stars is because we like to group stars that are close to each other and turn these random dots in the sky into recognizable images.

Finally, let's talk about the principle called continuity. When you look at this image, try to mentally follow a path along one line. When you got to the middle, your visual path probably didn't suddenly change direction. Continuity is the automatic tendency to favor continuous paths when looking at a series of points or lines. Continuity is very helpful when we're reading a road map, trying to see what towns we might pass through on a given highway. It's also helpful when we're reading a spreadsheet, and we want to keep track of which column or row we're on.

While there are other Gestalt principles, you get the idea. Our minds have automaticity in the processes of sensation and perception to help us organize our worlds in the most meaningful and efficient way possible. While usually these principles are very helpful, you can see how they could also create interesting optical illusions. Even though this lesson focused mostly on visual examples of organizational principles, you can imagine how we use the same principles for our other senses as well. For example, when you're in a busy restaurant talking to your friend, you can filter out what your friend is saying from the noises in the rest of the room. That's the principle of figure/ground at work but using the sense of hearing instead of the sense of vision. Your conversation with your friend is the figure, and all the chatter, the radio or TV and the glasses clinking away is the ground, or auditory background. Can you think of other examples?

Lesson Summary

The cognitive perspective of psychology studies how we think about, remember and perceive the world. This perspective is sometimes called the information processing perspective.

While sensation is how our brains receive stimulus information from our sensory neurons, perception is how our brains understand those pieces of information as meaningful ideas.

The automatic tendencies we have as we interpret our world were identified by the Gestalt psychologists, who identified several principles of organization.

The next time you walk around your house or town, try to recognize when you're using these principles. You'll be surprised at how often you do!

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Educational Approaches\ Methods In Special Education

Educational Approaches\ Skills In Special Education

Contents

1.Oral and Aural Method

2.Trends in Special education

3.Auditory Approach

4.Auditory Training

Educational Approaches

            Before we put into action any kind of educational approach we first must assess the severity of the hearing loss. After, we can pick a method for each individual child.   There are three primary communication methods used in education of deaf children. These are:

Oral communication refers to the speaking and listening skills needed to participate verbally in discussions, exchange thoughts and information, make clear and convincing presentations, and interact with a variety of audiences.

In the workplace, oral communication skills are used to greet customers, discuss products and prices with suppliers, and explain work procedures to co-workers. Other examples of tasks include taking messages, speaking with clients on the phone, delivering and receiving verbal instructions, participating in meetings, delivering presentations, negotiating agreements and resolving conflicts.

NEW PROPOSED DEFINITION

Oral communication is the knowledge and skills needed effectively exchange thoughts and information with others by speaking, listening and using non-verbal cues such as body language.

At work, people need oral communication skills to greet customers, discuss products and prices with suppliers, and explain work procedures to co-workers. Other examples of oral communication tasks include speaking with clients on the phone, delivering and receiving verbal instructions, participating in meetings, delivering presentations, negotiating agreements and resolving conflicts.

Aural Communication

Aural communication involves the transmission of information through the auditory sensory system—the system of speaking and hearing. It usually encompasses both verbal communication and paralinguistic communication to convey meaning. Aural communication can be used to transmit information independently or in combination with visual communication. When conducting surveys, the mode of data collection determines whether information can be transmitted aurally, visually, or both. Whether survey information is transmitted aurally or visually influences how respondents first perceive and then cognitively process information to provide their responses. Aural communication relies heavily on verbal language when information is transmitted through spoken words. Additionally, paralinguistic or paraverbal communication, in which information is conveyed through the speaker's 

                          
  a) Oral/aural - an approach to deaf education that emphasizes auditory training, articulation ability and lip-reading. 

                            b) Total communication -  a method of interacting with individuals with language impairments using a combination of spoken language and signs, which includes sign language, voice, finger-spelling, lip-reading, amplification, writing, gesture and visual imagery (pictures).

                            c) Bilingual/bicultural (bi-bi) - This is a philosophy of teaching that recognizes the authenticity and importance of both hearing and Deaf cultures, and that incorporates elements of both in the classroom.  Programs are modeled on English as a Second Language (ESL) programs. 

                       These methods have undergone waves of popularity and some are much older than others.  This doesn't mean, though, that one is better than the other.  Each individual is different, therefore each individual needs a different type of method to help them with their development of language, communication and to aid them in their learning.   In these methods there may be techniques that are used to aid the child with a particular method, such as:

                            a) American Sign Language - a complete language, related historically to the French.  This is the manual language used by the Deaf community in the United States.  

                            b) Cued Speech - a manual used by some deaf children and their teachers/parents, that uses hand shapes near the mouth to help make lip-reading easier.  

                            c) Lip-reading (Speech-reading) - Decoding the language of a speaker by paying close attention to the face and mouth, without being able to hear the speaker's voice. 

                           As well as these different methods and different techniques, there are different places and settings that the Deaf, or a child with a hearing impairment can learn, such as:

                             a) Mainstreaming - the practice of incorporating children with disabilities into the regular classroom instead of keeping them apart in special classes. 

                            b) Residential schools - these are schools designed for Deaf individuals, particular, to live and learn in a school where Deaf people and the Deaf culture surrounds them everyday.

                                                      Oral/Aural

• In the United States, the oral/aural approach is historically the oldest.  
• Oralist approach of deaf education have believed that deaf children are best served by instruction in lip-reading, in maximum use of residual hearing (through amplification and auditory training), and in articulation to improve speech.  

Auditory-Oral Approach

• This approach combines speech, use of residual hearing and speech-reading. 
• This approach is the more traditional of the auditory verbal/oral approaches. 
• The child will be trained to use his or her hearing and develop expressive speech. 
• Pure oralism strongly emphasizes no signing and speech is the only acceptable means of response.  
• The goal of this approach is to have the child mainstreamed into the child's regular school after having completed an oral deaf or hard of hearing special education program.
• In order for success five elements must be present:

                               1) Parent involvement 

                               2) Appropriate amplification

                               3) Consistent quality speech training

                               4) Developing appropriate language instruction

                               5) Range of placement option 

Auditory-Verbal Approach

• Although the auditory-oral  emphasize speech-reading, this method does not. 
• The child is taught to listen first and is not required to look at the speaker's mouth for information. 
• Often, the child is mainstreamed from the start in a typical preschool rather than a special self-contained oral program.
• The goal of auditory-verbal practice is for children who are deaf or hard of hearing to grow up in "typical" learning and living environment that enables them to become independent, participating, and contributing citizens in an complete mainstream society.  This is because all children with a hearing loss deserve an opportunity to develop the ability to listen and use verbal communication with their families and communities.  
• This method emphasizes the increase likelihood that young children, deaf or hard of hearing, can be educated to use even minimal amounts of residual or remaining hearing.  The use of amplified residual hearing permits these children to learn to listen, process verbal language, and to speak.
• With this method, disadvantages that are connected with dependence on speech-reading are eliminated.

Auditory training

• Auditory training is teaching a person with a hearing impairment how to use the residual or remaining hearing that is available to them with the goal of maximizing use of speech and non-speech cues. 
• In developing an approach to auditory training, it is important that the clinician consider the amount of hearing that the client has. 
• Clients with aided hearing levels in the mild to moderately severe hearing range would work on sound discrimination skills. 
• Clients with aided hearing levels within the severe to profound hearing loss range would improve the detection of sounds, particularly environmental sounds.  Therefore, the person may develop at least a functional use of their hearing.  
• The emphasis is on teaching the auditory skills that may be delayed or missing altogether. 

Lip reading (Speech-reading) - Cued Speech

• This is a method, in which the deaf are able to read the speech of others from the movements of the lips and mouth. 
• It is also referred to as speech-reading, which includes the reading of facial expressions and body language. 
• Speech-reading is not normally used by itself. It is a coping skill we use to communicate effectively with either wearing hearing aids or using assistive listening devices and practicing effective coping strategies.

• Cued speech is also known as cued English or cued language. 
• Cued Speech is a sound-based hand supplement to speech-reading.  
• In cued speech, eight hand shapes representing groups of consonants are placed in four positions around the face that indicated groups of vowel sounds.  The shapes and locations in combination with the mouth movements eliminate the ambiguity that speech-reading produces.
• Combined with the natural lip movements of speech, the cues make spoken language visible.
• Cued Speech in the spoken language, while American Sign Language is the signed language. 
• Cued Speech shows pronunciation, accent, duration, and the rhythm of speech.
• Unless they learn American Sign Language as a second language, students who grow up using Cued Speech are not able to communicate with the larger community of Deaf adults who use sign language.

Benefits

• It can be learned in a relatively short period of time, which is helpful for parents and family, as well as the child. 
• Cued speech is a way to provide full access to spoken communication through the visual code. 
• It provides an appropriate foundation for reading and writing English. It positively affects literacy because it enables a deaf child to internalize the language. The step of internalizing a language is critical to the process of learning how to read and write. 
• Cued speech prevents parents from over-simplifying their English or "dumb down"  because they are communicating in a language they are  familiar with and do not have to make themselves more easily understood. 
• Children that use Cued Speech speech-read more accurately. 
• Cued speech gives a child an improvement in auditory discrimination. 
• Hearing families who use Cued Speech have better communication and fewer behavioral problems.

                    The key to an aural/oral approach is practice.  The child must be immersed in a speech-intensive environment at home and school. 

Total Communication Method

• Total communication is the title of a philosophy of communication and not a method.
• A number of sign systems, such as cued speech, were developed to convey manual representations of English sentence structure along with spoken language.  The sign systems translate words and grammatical morphemes used in spoken English into visible hand configurations and gestures.  
• All of the systems basically follow the share the same features: 

                        1) they generally familiarize themselves with some American Sign Language signs for vocabulary,

                        2) to convey grammatical concepts, that are not expressed by separate signs in American Sign Language they invent new signs, such as an article,

                        3) they also produce sentences that copy the syntactic structure of English. 

• Total communication is often the first approach recommended because it encourages a child to use to use every available mode of communication to both receive and convey messages. The mode of communication depends on the particular need of the child, whether it is manual, oral, auditory, and written. 
• Today simultaneous communication is the most common form of communication used in educational settings for deaf children. 

Benefits

• The main benefit is that it opens all roads and modes of communication for the deaf child. 
• It allows flexibility without eliminating any options. 
• It allows the child to choose the form that is best for them in a given situation. 
• It also allows the child some form of expressive communication. 

Bilingual/bicultural (bi-bi) Method

"A person who is bicultural can move freely within and between two different cultures. Biculturalism implies an understanding of the mores, customs, practices, and expectations of members of a cultural group and the ability to adapt to their expectations" (Finnegan)

• Individuals, who are Deaf, are considered bilingual if they are able to communicate effectively in both American Sign Language and English.     
• They are considered bicultural if they are capable of functioning in both the Deaf community and the majority culture. 

"Research has shown that effective language has to be fast and clear. ASL is an efficient language for visual learning and is easier for Deaf children to acquire as a first language than any form of English" (Finnegan)

• Bi-bi programs are modeled after English as a Second Language (ESL) and foreign language interest programs.  These programs emphasize the positive aspects of the Deaf culture. 
• Bilingual-bicultural (bi-bi) programs have admiration for both American Sign Language and English. 
• In bi-bi education American Sign Language is used as the primarily language of instruction in order to introduce it as the child's first language.   
• Deaf culture is an important aspect to the curriculum. 
• English language skills are taught after proficiency in American Sign Language is reached.  
• This approach is for all children, no matter what there hearing loss is, but these programs are usually not to be found in mainstreaming, but in residential and day schools.  

Benefits

• Early contact to comprehensible language, such as American Sign Language, helps early cognitive development.  This promotes increased literacy and greater academic achievement. 
• Students who attend bilingual-bicultural programs develop functional skills in two languages. 
• The emphasis of early language acquisition and establishing American Sign Language, as their first language, provides a base, in which English is later taught. 
• Students in bi-bi programs have an increased self-esteem and confidence because of the healthy view of Deaf children and their acceptance of who they are, as well as the increased confidence to function in bi-bi environments.

A statistic: 

            A little over 40% of students in American residential and day-schools, which are designed for deaf and hearing-impaired children were using a form of a bi-bi programming, while a larger portion of the remainder were using manually coded English/total-communication. 

                                                               American Sign Language 

• Sign language for the deaf was first organized in France during the 18th century by Abbot Charles-Michel l'Epée. French Sign Language was brought to the United States in 1816 by Thomas Gallaudet, founder of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Conn. He developed American Sign Language, a language of gestures and hand symbols that express words and concepts.
• American Sign Language is considered the language of the Deaf community and is used in the United States and Canada. 
• American Sign Language is a distant language within the scope of the world's languages, with its own syntactic, semantic, and configurational rules. 
• It is composed of manual gestures called signs in combination with various types of non-manual grammar, such as mouth morphemes, appropriate facial expression, body movement and many more. 
• Some of American Sign Language's grammatical features include directional verbs, classifiers, rhetorical questions and the sequential aspect.  It has its own grammar that does not in any way reflect the grammar of English. 
• People who use American Sign Language use the physical space in front of them to create the mental picture. American Sign Language is suited to the eyes. The eyes see “the whole picture," therefore a signer can use more than one sign alongside.

Benefits 

• Children learning American Sign Language generally develop their first signed words at approximately the same age as children who are acquiring oral language.  
• Deaf children who learn sign language in preschool do better in academics, such as learning to read and write English, as well as better behaviorally and socially.
• American Sign Language is also far easier on a child’s eyes than any of the Manual Codes of English Systems. 
• Deaf children of deaf parents are better linguistically than deaf peers born of hearing parents.  This could be due to early language acquisition. 
• American Sign Language can allow children to maximize their higher education.

                   Trends                                                         

Mainstreaming

• Mainstreaming is a placement option in which children go to regular classes, as well as going to some special education classes. 
• These classes are called resource classes and are taught by specially trained teachers. 
• Deaf students who are mainstreamed miss out on the feeling of belonging that individuals from the Deaf culture associate with their residential schools, and their experience is very different from those who attend residential school. Mainstreamed students often are singled out in many respects.
• One common complaint about mainstreaming is that the children are only in the regular classrooms for non-core subjects such as Physical Education and Art. 

Benefits

• A child that is in these types of environments has the opportunity to meet and interact with hearing peers. 
• They are also exposed to a regular curriculum. 
• These children often learn how to be self-starters. 
• They develop excellent study habits that serve them well as adults, which could be in part because of their inability to understand the teacher and the other students. 
• These students

Exclusive Education

Inclusion allows the student with disabilities to receive instruction in the general education with special education services coming to them. For example: a student with difficulties in reading would have the special education teacher come to them to receive their instruction in the same room with their non-disabled peers. Some school districts call this collaboration, in which the general education teacher and special education teacher collaborate to provide instruction to all the students.

Benefits

Here are key findings about the benefits of inclusion for children and families:

  Families’ visions of a typical life for their children can come true.

All parents want their children to be accepted by their peers, have friends and lead “regular” lives. Inclusive settings can make this vision a reality for many children with disabilities.

  Children develop a positive understanding of themselves and others.

When children attend classes that reflect the similarities and differences of people in the real world, they learn to appreciate diversity. Respect and understanding grow when children of differing abilities and cultures play and learn together.

  Friendships develop.

Schools are important places for children to develop friendships and learn social skills. Children with and without disabilities learn with and from each other in inclusive classes.

  Children learn important academic skills.

In inclusive classrooms, children with and without disabilities are expected to learn to read, write and do math. With higher expectations and good instruction children with disabilities learn academic skills.

  All children learn by being together.

Because the philosophy of inclusive education is aimed at helping all children learn, everyone in the class benefits. Children learn at their own pace and style within a nurturing learning environment.

Residential Schools

• A residential school is for students who are deaf or have a severe hearing impairment.  It has a comprehensive academic, health, and socialization program including dormitory.  Most programs serve preschool ages through grade 12. 
• Residential life as the ideal opportunity for students who are deaf to become familiar with and acculturated into the Deaf community.
• The Deaf culture is passed on from one generation to the next through the residential school, where they learn such things as Deaf folklore and folk life from other children, Deaf teachers and Deaf house parents. 
• Most schools accept students based on degree of hearing loss, academic needs, parental choice, and other factors. 
• Any child with a hearing loss becomes a member of the Deaf culture, but through schooling residential schools. 
• Recently residential schools enrollment has decreased because of mainstreaming becoming an option for Deaf students, as well the population of Deaf children has decreased because of recent vaccinations. Therefore many residential schools have shut down. 

Benefits

• The schools are designed with the needs of deaf students in mind.
• The opportunity for peer interaction is available because of the variety of after school activities. 
• Deaf children have adult Deaf role models.
•  

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