Three Level of Cognition

We learn things and absorb knowledge from the others or from the new task every day. Actually, when we reach the media or news, we come to an action called cognition, whose hierarchy can be defined as three levels. Level 1 is Cognition. It is a set of mental processes which includes attention, memory, read, writing, etc. Level 2 is Metacognition, which means to cognize the cognition. In specific, it’s the ability about knowing one’s own cognitive processes and regulating these processes. Level 3 is so-called Epistemic Cognition. Individuals share their ideas with each other and rise above them to reach the goal of knowledge advancement, which reflects on the limits, certainty as well as criteria of knowing.

Three Level Hierarchy of Cognition

As a contrast, there is a classification of learning objectives called Bloom’s Taxonomy. It divides cognition into six degrees, which are as follows: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation. It might has more detail of its hierarchy, but when it comes to Social Networking fields and problems solving, that three level of cognition is adaptable to some degree and thus we focus on that hierarchy.

At the first level, it might be easy to understand the cognition because when we read news from Twitter or WeiBo, we just process the cognition at its stage. It’s very common to be at this cognition stage when we write something or memorize something. As for the second level, we defined metacognition as “knowing about knowing” or “learning how to learn”. In Social Networking, for example, data processing is at the stage of metacognition, the evolution of the progress, such as Facebook Timeline, as well. We usually categorize or classify things by their property in order to find them easily later and this process is also metacognition. For instance, we want to find our old friends in the Social Network, yet we just can’t remember all the name of our friends at the time. We then simply categorize them by the time we know each other. By searching the high school, we can always find the our high school mates. In other situation, we know friends’ birthplace and then we add a restriction on birthplace, and after all, we just find them by looking up the city.

Picture of Facebook Timeline form website

At the highest level, the Epistemic Cognition, who has five key components, leads you to reach the goal of knowledge. From the lecture, we know the five key components are as follows:

1.       Epistemic aims

2.       Structure of knowledge

3.       Certainty, sources, and justification of knowledge

4.       Epistemic virtue and responsibility

5.       Reliably and processes

Prof. Chan gave out the questionnaire about Epistemic Cognition to us to finish, and in comparison between two columns of affection with or without the Social Networking, we know exactly how the Internet and Social Networking influence our knowledge. To summary, Internet and Social Networking make us rethink about the knowledge and broaden our vision to the knowledge, even to the truth.

From the lecture, we bring home to ourselves to learn the cognition. Besides, we learn the way that we still focus on the Social Networking and distinguish what stage are we at among the three levels of cognition. What’s more, we know that Social Networking is not only about Internet but also involves psychology and cognition.