Implicit Cognitive Vulnerability Through Nudges, Boosts, and Bounces

Background

Implicit cognitive vulnerability is grounded within an understanding around the cognitive interworkings of a learner’s ability to safely and openly engage within an environment, towards successfully folding new information and new ideas into one’s long-term memory. Grounded in the work of learning theorists and psychologists, the understandings around Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs of physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem and self-actualization (Maslow, 1943, 1954, 1961, 1962a, 1962b, 1963, 1964, 1969a, 1969b, 1970, 1971, 1979, 1982, 1987, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c) with next step understandings around Koltko-Rivera’s (2006) work that highlights self-transcendence as a creative endeavor far beyond one’s self frames the importance of an environment in which learning can occur are bound within Vygotsky’s Conceptual Framework of Understanding (Vygotsky, 1933/1966, 1934/1987, 1935, 1962, 1978 1981) that highlights the ability of a person to cognitively rethink, restructure and re-frame short-term and long-term information that is the basis of initial knowledge acquisition as well as lifelong learning. Yet Wittgenstein’s work (1922) work around word choices that embed nuanced meanings and potential biases as well as communicated understandings around subject matter is supportive of implicit cognition and the vulnerability of the learner’s cognitive processes. Also inherent in an understanding of Implicit Cognitive Vulnerability is Bandura’s work associated with a learner’s motivational engagement and sense of self-efficacy, framed through motivation and self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977, 1986, 1997), including expectancy constructs (Parsons & Goff, 1978) that lead into scaffolding an understanding of Vroom’s expectancy theory (1964) suggesting that an “intensity of work effort depends on the perception that an individual’s effort will result in a desired outcome” (Holdford & Lovelace-Elmore, 2001, p. 8).