Psychology

Recognition is one of the three basic memory tasks. It involves identifying objects or events that have been encountered before.

Recognition (re+cognition) is a process that occurs in thinking when some event, process, pattern, or object recurs; a knowledge or feeling that someone or something present has been encountered before. Coming from the base cognition; cognition has various uses in different fields of study and has generally accepted to be used for the process of awareness or thought.

In psychology, cognition is used for information processing view of a person's psychological functions. This takes place as we process the stimuli with previous memories and experiences and find relationships between the current stimuli and our memories.

Thus, in order for something to be recognized, it must be familiar. This recurrence allows the recognizer to more properly react, survival value. Recognition is a survival mechanism. Humans and animals will recognize certain foods, which are poisonous through taste, as they have tasted them before. This works also for sounds and alarms, which we are trained to react to such as fire alarms.

Without we would go through life reliving everything without learning from the past. Experiences would be pointless, as they would not be remembered.

Recognition is the easiest of the memory tasks. Thats is why multiple-choice tests are often considered easier than other tests. In multiple-choice tests, you only need to recognize the right answer. You do not have to come up with the answer on your own. Recognition uses the memories we have in place to help with the situation, which the person(s) is going through in the present. When the recognizer has correctly responded, this is a measure of understanding.

Ethology

Also animals have the ability to recognize and imitate actions. For example, when some animals have never seen a human being before, they do not hide and they show no fear; but when they learn that a human being may be a threat, they may emit distress cries, flee or hide. Baby spiders will flee when a mother spider sends a sharp pulse along the spider web. A male spider will gently poke a female spider's web to assess whether it is safe or not without being killed himself. “Even non-mammals can recognize when a situation signals danger, and will flee or hide.” As an example of recognition the article discusses how not only humans are subject to recognition but animals also recognize characteristics and figures. The National Geographic includes an article, which involves animal's ability to recognize and imitate actions. This can be seen, as dogs will bark at strangers or when they sense something different in their surroundings. In a forest-fire animals will sense the smoke and flee in the opposite direction. The following quote is an example of what animals have been studied doing. As “sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals.” We also see birds building nests with twigs and other small sticks and leafs, this too can be seen as tools used to build.