Beginnings of Cognitive Science - Advances in Cognitive Information Systems - page 11

phenomenon of emotional states occurring and their link to basic functions of hu-
man mental processes making use of attention, perception, memory or language
[24]. The 20 th century saw critical reflection about the development of cognitive
science, namely that work aimed at studying the impact of emotions had been to-
tally neglected. As a result, this somewhat neglected area became the subject of
intense research. It is notable how small the group of scientists was who re-
searched emotions from the perspective of cognitive science, but who laid the
foundations for an extremely important analysis of this phenomenon and at the
same time characterised many components and tremendously important details of
the researched phenomenon. They were: Paul Ekman [33], Jerome Kagan [51],
Richard S. Lazarus [61], George Mandler [67], Robert B. Zajonc [158], Steven
Schachter and Joel Singer [124].
Emotional processes studied by the above scientists formed firm ground for
learning the functions and properties of a psychogenetic area called the limbic sys-
tem. The links between that system and the emotions that arise are of great impor-
tance because emotions are compared to other functions connected with other
brain structures. The difference between emotions and the cognitive acquisition of
new information is due to the duality of structures and functions between the lim-
bic system and the neocortex.
A new element in the research work on human emotions was the presentation,
by many researchers studying neurophysiologic cases, of extremely important
links between human emotional states and the right brain hemisphere (Roger
Sperry, Joan C. Borod [11], Richard Davidson [25], Steven Z. Rapcsak, Joel F.
Comer and Arnold E. Rubens [121]).
Psychology distinguished the following stages in the process of understanding
any information received by a human and subjected to a cognitive analysis:

• information recording - may boil down to a single perception cycle, but it may

also take a complex form which assumes an explorative activity of the individual;

• memorising - may consist in the simple fixing in memory of detailed informa-

tion, i.e. facts, patterns of objects and methods of action, but in more complex
situations may consist in creating a universal memory trace (a gnostic unit) ca-
pable of generating features subsequently needed to use the knowledge pos-
sessed in the process of understanding new situations being analysed;

• coding the information obtained - making it confidential, its encryption and

decryption form the basic components of the coding phase. It is also possible to
split information and share it;

• storage - the latent stage of mental processes which cannot be researched di-

rectly, whose nature and course must be reasoned out from the last phase;
There are reasons to believe that storage is not just a passive process of keeping
information, but consists in creating subsequent versions of more and more re-
fined internal representations of the knowledge possessed and systems of its in-
ternal links;