If I leave the Education Department of my university and wander into the adjacent building, I enter a strange land inhabited by people called electronics engineers. If I tell them that I am interested in information processing, they start talking to me about computerized information processing. There are many similarities between human and computerized information processing. These similarities are not a coincidence: at first computers were designed to imitate human brains, and more recently cognitive psychologists have reversed the process and have begun to use analogies from computer science to understand human thinking. The following paragraphs describe some components of computerized information processing that have analogies in human thinking.
Sensory register. Computers have to get their initial input from somewhere outside the computer. This information may be registered at the keyboard, through a modem, or in some other manner. It stays in this temporary register area for only a few nanoseconds before it is moved into the computer's random access memory.
Working memory. The random access memory (RAM) corresponds to the human working memory. This is the electronic area where the computer combines, integrates, and generates output from data that are brought in through input devices or are retrieved from read only memory (ROM) or from a storage area.
Long-term memory. Data can be stored on disk or programmed into ROM for relatively permanent storage. This information is available to interact with the information in RAM whenever the program requires it.
Forgetting. If a program is defective, it may not be possible to retrieve information. Failure to retrieve information may occur because the program stored the data incorrectly or because the program is not correctly designed to retrieve information that was properly stored.
There are many other analogies that can be drawn between computers and the human mind. For example, computer programmers have a saying "Garbage in, garbage out," which refers to the idea that if the computer is given faulty input it will generate faulty output. Likewise, students who spend vast amounts of time on a poorly conceived curriculum are not likely to arrive at productive educational outcomes.
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