Exploring social cognition and how aspects of perception and judgement might affect stereotyping of gender using a Vignette study.

Essay by mohypnoUniversity, Bachelor'sB, June 2006

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Changes in our environments require us too continuingly to learn new skills and acquire new knowledge therefore it must be said that learning requires an acquisition of new knowledge or new skills, in order for us to cope better in our ever changing environments. Psychologists would agree with the idea that learning creates change, but different psychological perspectives have different views of what is important to learning and what is the best way of studying learning. In this essay it be will discussed and explained using specific research examples of how learning is studied from the cognitive (how information is processed in the mind) and the socialcultural (the use of tools and culture) psychological perspectives, what both of these perspectives specifically mean by learning and how they research their theories to come to their conclusions of how learning is achieved.

Both cognitive and socialcultural psychological theories come about with psychologists asking different questions about how learning is achieved; psychological theorists adopt different approaches to learning, for example, cognitive psychologists focus on how the mind processes information using categorization to organize experiences and to make sense of things.

Socialcultural psychologists focus more on environmental factors, like social interaction and the use of tools for example computers.

The cognitive perspective begun as a cognitive revolution in the 1960s, which arose not only from dissatisfaction with the behaviourism psychological perspective, but also with the technological advances that have occurred since the 1960s, for example computers. Cognitive psychologists see the mind as having a connection to complex machines for example computers; they see the human mind as a machine metaphor. Their view is that both the human mind and computers function in terms of information processing. Cognitive psychologists have studied many different kinds of learning, however, category learning is viewed as giving the best...