Cognitive Drive -
"Because meaningful learning provides its own reward, cognitive drive (the desire to know and understand, to master knowledge, to formulate and solve problems) is more important than in rote or instrumental learning. (Ausubel, 1980, pg. 367)
The Role of Cognitive Structure in Learning -
"It follows from the very nature of accretion to the psychological structure of knowledge, through the assimiliation process, that existing cognitive structure itself--both the substantive content of an individual's structure of knowledge and its major organizational properties in a particular subject-knowledge and its major organizational properties in a particular subject-matter field at any given time--is the principal factor influencing meaningful learning and retention in this same field." (Ausubel, 1980, pg. 127)
Cognitive Structure and Word Meaning -
"According to the cognitive structure view, meaning is an idiosyncratic phenomenological product of a meaningful learning process in which the potential meaning inherent in symbols and sets of symbols becomes converted into differentiated cognitive content within a given individual. Potential meaning thus becomes converted into phenomenological meaning when a particular individual, employing a meaningful learning set, incorporates a potentially meaningful sign or proposition within his cognitive structure. (Ausubel, 1965, pg. 67)
Interpreting the Infant's Cognitive Experience -
"Before infants are capable of giving verbal introspective reports we can only speculate on the nature of their cognitive experience. Such speculations, which must rest on inferences from behavior, on logical plausibility and on estimates of prevailing cognitive sophistication, are obviously subject to all the serious errors of 'adultomorphism.'" (Ausubel, Sullivan, & Ives, 1980, pg.374)Perception -
"A particular perceptual experience always reflects interaction between internal and external determinants. External determinants include such structural characteristics of the physical stimulus situation as figure-ground relationships, proximity, similiarity, contrast, continuity, etc., as well as various contextual factors. (Ausubel, Sullivan, & Ives, 1980, pg.375)
"In the area of perception, differentiation refers to the increasing tendency with repeated exposures to a given array of stimulation to perceive distinctions, separate regions, and detailed structure in what originally appeared to be a global and homogeneous field (J.J. Gibson, 1953; E.J.Gibson, 1963, 1969; Gochman, 1966). (Ausubel, Sullivan, & Ives, 1980, pg.381)
"Cognition is the act of knowing. The analysis of the act and its components is the core of psychologists' and educators' attempts to understand the mind and its development. Cognition is nevertheless a troublesome term in psychology, because it has no clear referent, is defined so narrowly by some as merely "awareness" (e.g., Guilford, 1967), and is defined so broadly by others as to included all higher mental processes (viz., perception, thinking, attention, language, reasoning, problem-solving, creativity, and memory). Still it is fair to say that psychology has always been about cognitition, even if it did not use the term until the 1960s." (Murray, 1984, pg. 7)
Research in Cognitive Psychology -
"While the mind as a computer metaphor nourished theories of cognitive psychology, the empirical need to support these theories with precise measures of the flow of information through the mind generated new research techniques and paradigms. Most of these avoided the need for introspection through the careful construction [of] tasks for research subjects, the precise timing of a person's responses to various tasks (Posner, 1978), the tracking of a person's eye movements (Cohen, 1978), or the analyzing of distortions and errors that occur in a subject's recollection on perception of events (Lachman et al., 1979). Newell (1973) catalogued 59 cognitive research paradigms, for example." (Murray, 1984, pg. 9)