Processing Paradigm - The Information Processing Paradigm

¶ … Processing Paradigm - The information processing paradigm (IP) is a concept in which one understanding learning as a process that individuals are cognitively active in their participation. Humans actively collect, store, modify, interpret, analyze, synthesize and incorporate new information with past knowledge, build upon that, and move forward to new explorations of learning. Learning, then, is not limited to the rote memorization of facts (bits of information), but also includes doing more with that information and finally coming up with something new and unique (Miller, 2009; Pashler and Carrier, 2006).

One of the phenomenal changes in the 20th century has been the complexity of modern life -- the myriad of choices, cohesions, challenges, and above all, technological improvement. This has ever been as important as it is in the current global economic model. Globalization, as well as the huge clinical and technological changes that are occurring so fast that one can almost not keep up with them -- partially due to the half-life of technology (Internet, mass media, etc.), and partially due to the access individuals now have in various parts of the world to rising social standards and hopes (Sampson, 1989).

With the consistent amount and quality of information changing so rapidly, information has become, in and of itself, a commodity. In order for that information to have meaning, to allow divergent fields from marketing to sociology to grasp and use that information, then learning must be a continual (lifelong) active process that has the capacity to change the individual and therefore society. This we call constructivism (Burleson, 2007). The new world of facts, and of the continual problem of vetting facts and sources, moves from knowledge and understanding as basic goals to evaluating and creating. Computer technology improvements, along with information needs, have made this IP model critical in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Part 2 -- One of the changes in contemporary marketing is that it has become a renaissance field in which multidisciplinary knowledge is no longer a 'nice-to,' but now a requirement. This especially includes those involved in marketing research and product development and their understanding of the psychology of memory.

Memory is the ability of any organism to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. For humans, the idea of memory is seminal with advanced civilization, and in the 20th and 21st century, important for marketing due to the tremendous complexity of the marketplace, the wide-variety of products and services available, and most importantly, the number of messages being sent to the consumer in every way imaginable. For humans, short-term memory (STM) allows for a recall of several seconds to a few minutes; chunking information into the brain and coding it for immediate use. Long-term memory, however, can store much larger, more complex forms of information that can be synthesized, adapted and formed into opinions, judgments, and purchasing actions (attention).