In general, cognitive(认知的) psychologists who study memory, language, and thought see these human behaviors as information processing involving input, processing (coding and storage ), and retrievel (检索). Perhaps the best and most obvious way to describe the information processing view of thought is to compare the human being with a computer. Information is coded and fed into a computer in an organized way. When the computer is asked to produce a part of that information, the machine searches its memory and outputs the information on a screen or prints it out. For example, we might ask for the names of all people hired by a large multinational bank on July 12, 1984. This relatively simple task is equivalent to asking you to search your memory for the names of the first seven presidents of the United States. Then we might ask the computer to tell us who among the workers hired on July 12, 1984, was the most productive. This task is more complex because these data do not exist in the computer precisely in that form. The computer could not simply reproduce information from its memory; to produce the data requested, it would have to process the information it did have -- analyze and manipulate it in some way. If the computer had data on the number of items processed per day, the absences, and the number of quality complaints for each worker, it could collect that information, analyze it, and answer the question.
The operation of human cognitive processes is basically similar to the way a computer functions but except for speed of calculation, our abilities far surpass those of the most sophisticated computer. One area of research, known as artificial intelligence, concentrates on developing computer programs that reproduce certain human cognitive functions. Although some of the programs work well in certain simplified situations, no program can yet cope with the complex input and output functions required of most human beings.
In order to understand how we process information, we will look at three stages -- input, processing (coding and storage), and retrieval -- in more detail.