Informational acquisition and cognitive models

Abstract

Life forms must organize information into cognitive models reflecting the outside environment, and in a complex and changing environment a life form must constantly select and organize this mass of information to avoid slipping into a chaotic cognitive state. The task of developing and maintaining adaptive cognitive models can be understood through two processes, crucial to regulating the interconnections between environmental elements. The inclusion and exclusion of information follows a process designated by P and the process by which cognitive models change is designated by K. Higher order concepts are created by reducing the interconnections between elements to a minimal number to avoid cognitive chaos. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 9:31–37, 2004

Systemic view of learning scientific concepts: A description in terms of directed graph model

“…Another problem hindering its progress is that the systemic view, when associating concept learning with persistent, dynamically stable attractor‐type states of the system , must define these attractors in relation to the system's structure and properties of the system. This requires defining and modelling the system and its constituents .…”

Entropy and Energy in Characterizing the Organization of Concept Maps in Learning Science

“…Such a description also makes close contact to the more intuitive and qualitative description of the cognitive process behind knowledge organization, where the idea of "reduction of cognitive load" by knowledge organization is central. The lowering of free energy can be interpreted as a lowering of the total cognitive load (comprising of intrinsic and germane loads) through ordering the knowledge as triangular patterns, expected to be stable patterns in knowledge organization [31]. In summary, the model we have suggested here points out that some important and central features of organized knowledge representations may be quite simple, like the organization of knowledge around stable and easily tractable patterns of triangular cycles.…”

“…The triangular patterns may also be combined to give rise to 4-cycles of the form shown also in Figure 1. It is interesting to note that triangular patterns like those in Figure 1 have been recognized as an essential feature not only in the case of functional knowledge [6,14] but also in information acquisition and in the evolution of knowledge [31] as well as information processing [28,29,32]. …”