Discuss How Social or Cultural Factors Affect One Cognitive Process

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Cognitive processes are concerned with the way in which your mind processes the information you receive from your senses. In order to make sense of all the information we receive, our mind transforms it. There are many different cognitive processes including: perception, problem solving and memory; this essay will discuss the ways in which social or cultural factors affect memory. Social and cultural factors refer to the ways in which your environments affect mental processes. The social or cultural factors that will be focused on in this essay are poverty and education, and how they affect memory will be discussed. According to research, poverty has a significant impact on memory. Evidence shows that poverty negatively affects memory. Stress caused by poverty has a detrimental effect on the way that children’s brains develop. The working memory is the ability to hold certain pieces of information in the brain for the current use. The working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle class children. The evidence of that is sociological and medical study made by Evan's and Schambergs. The study focused on stress level in poor middle class students. They found a direct link between poverty, stress and memory. Students from poorest environment scored higly in stress test and low in memory test in comparison to middle class. Therefore, living in poverty increased stress level what has negative impact on memory. However the study does not show how the poverty was measured. It could be a relative poverty, in comparison to other people in environment or absolute poverty. In that case, it is impossible to measure absolute poverty in developed countries such as United Kingdom because the absolute poverty doesn't exist there. Moreover the problems with memory might not be an effect of stress. It could be the opposite.
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