Knowledge acquisition is the process of receiving, encoding, understanding, and recalling information. It begins with sensory cues and continues through schema building and modification. People are born without knowledge, but acquire it throughout their lives.
Knowledge acquisition typically refers to the process of acquiring, processing, understanding, and recalling information through one of several methods. This is often a field of study closely related to cognition, memory, and how humans are able to understand the world around them. While no single theory has been fully proven or universally accepted, many theories of knowledge acquisition contain similarities that can be considered fundamental aspects of the process. Knowledge acquisition typically details how people experience new information, how that information is stored in the brain, and how that information can be recalled for later use.
One of the primary components of acquiring knowledge is the assumption that people are born without knowledge and that it is acquired during a person’s lifetime. This is often used in tandem with the idea of a person as a clean slate or “blank slate”. Some approaches to knowledge acquisition have been built on the idea that people have a predisposition to knowledge or are born with certain values or knowledge already in place. The “tabula rasa” approach considers human beings as essentially empty of knowledge at birth and that new information is acquired and used throughout a person’s life.
Knowledge acquisition typically begins with the process of receiving or acquiring new information. This is usually done through visual, auditory and tactile cues that a person receives through their senses. When a person sees a dog for the first time, for example, she receives information about a dog’s appearance. Knowledge is acquired that indicates that a dog generally has four legs, is covered with fur, and has a tail.
Once information is received, knowledge acquisition typically continues through encoding and understanding that information. This coding process allows a person to build a cognitive model, sometimes called a schema, for a piece of information. The outline for a dog, continuing the example above, incorporates the information received to build a general sense of what constitutes “dogness.” When a person sees another animal, such as a kangaroo, he processes the new information, he sees that he doesn’t fit the pattern of a dog, and so he creates a new model for that new knowledge.
Knowledge acquisition then continues with the ability to effectively recall and modify stored information. When someone reviews a dog, they are able to recognize it as a dog by remembering the pattern for “dog” and seeing that it fits into that pattern. This can create cognitive dissonance when someone encounters an object that exists within a certain pattern, but doesn’t match certain aspects of that pattern.
Someone seeing a hairless dog for the first time, for example, may not initially fully recognize it as a dog and must adjust his schema for “dog” with the newly acquired knowledge that dogs can be hairless. This whole process of acquiring knowledge usually continues throughout a person’s life. It can be more intense, however, during the first few years of life as someone rapidly creates and changes patterns based on millions of different pieces of information.
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