Lesley Anderson

Virtual Environments and Your Cognition.

What do you think is the difference between
social cognition and visual cognition?

Cognition involves a set of mental activities that include thinking, knowing and remembering that enable us to process and understand information.

Social Cognition relates to people using these mental activities to process social information. It focuses on how we encode, store, retrieve, and apply information to social situations - knowing how to interact and behave when together with others.

“It studies the individual within a social or cultural context and focuses on how people perceive and interpret information they generate themselves (intrapersonal) and from others (interpersonal)” (Sternberg, 1994).

Visual Cognition centres round using these mental activities to process the visual cues we encounter such as, recognition of objects, words and faces as well as perception of textures, space and colour and enabling us to understand them in various situations and contexts.

Both social and visual cognition are learned through experience. The more we practice the skills of cognition in both social and visual areas the more knowledgeable I suppose we should become. This exercise has made me think about the person/people who lack this experience. As much of our social cognition comes from gathering information whilst watching and observing others, lack of social interaction, of sight or an ability to employ visual cognition skills has to have implications on how we develop on both intrapersonal and interpersonal levels. Inability to see or interpret the implicit language that goes on during social interaction, such as the facial expression or gesture, would make it much more difficult to be a “social” person who understands and demonstrates what is expected in all the varied situations encountered.