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If you don't know anything about trees and plants, all you see in the forest is a bunch of trees. But if you know the names and appearances of different plants, you might see oaks, elms, pines etc. Similarly, when you hear a foreign language, you just hear sounds that have no meaning and that you cannot remember, but if you know the language, you hear the individual words and the meaning they convey. If you look at a crowd of unfamiliar people, you see a crowd but if there is one person you know in the crowd, that person will stand out in your perception.

It seems to me that a general feature of our cognition is that we organize our perception by learning categories/patterns/prototypes. The undifferentiated totality of our sensory input is presented in our awareness as a multitude of known objects. As we learn more about a certain subject, for instance a language or about trees or about guitars or whatever, we acquire new categories that facilitates our perception which allows us to be more discriminate in our perception and in our memory. If I visit someone who has a guitar in his or her home, I might notice and also remember that the guitar is a sunburst fender stratocaster with a 70's type neck, whereas my friend who does not know anything about guitar might struggle to remember even that there was a guitar.

What is the name of this general phenomenon, this basic aspect of our cognition?

I have come across the term "acquired distinctiveness", for instance in this paper: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1074.4272&rep=rep1&type=pdf

But that term seems to refer to a particular type of experimental paradigm in cognitive science rather than the phenomenon itself. Is there a broad, conceptual term for this feature of cognition?

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    $\begingroup$ [1/3] Salience is the term for the property of how attention-grabbing a stimulus is. Not sure what the term for learning-induced increases in salience is though. Also, I think it is important to look at latent inhibition, and how it relates to the learning curve of our understanding of specific stimuli. When we first learn of its existence, the latent inhibition towards it is low (thus, it is salient). It is also noisy, due to the lack of memory chunking its componets; therefore our memory of it is low-resolution. $\endgroup$
    – user110391
    Commented Sep 7, 2022 at 9:35
  • $\begingroup$ [2/3] As we learn more about it, salience may increase or decrease, depening on the relative rates of change of our understanding of it, and our questions about it (questions will be generated about is as we learn about it). Non-complex objects will be figured out pretty quickly to a satisfactory degree, and thus at this level of understanding it, it becomes background noise (we gain a high latent inhibition towards it). At the same time though, we MIGHT have a very high-resolution memory of this object (due to chunking), though this depends on if we even registerred the object. $\endgroup$
    – user110391
    Commented Sep 7, 2022 at 9:38
  • $\begingroup$ [3/3] So, learning about an object pulls both ways. During the process, it depends on the aforementioed relative rates. After the process, we either have no memory of it at all, or we have an extremely high-resolution memory of it; the latter requiring some kind of incentive to place the specific object into memory, as our lowered latent inhibition towards it is our default attitude towards it (for reasons of processing management, you don't need to inspect a doorknob everytime you use it). Also relevant is interest in the object, which comes to mind in regards to the guitar example. $\endgroup$
    – user110391
    Commented Sep 7, 2022 at 9:42
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    $\begingroup$ Thank you. I'm aware of the concept of salience and while my question might be expressed in terms of salience, I think the issue of what objects in our awareness become salient is a different kind of question because it obviously relates to many other factors than having a concept or not, for instance that edible things might become more salient when we're hungry or the posters on the wall of your office losing almost all salience when you see them every day. That doesn't really relate to my question, though salience is a part of it of course. $\endgroup$
    – JonB
    Commented Sep 7, 2022 at 13:14
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    $\begingroup$ @JonB My comments talked mostly about the process of how the salience of objects changes in relation to our knowledge about it, which is what your question is about. I also mentioned that general interest in the object is relevant to its salience too, which covers your hunger example. $\endgroup$
    – user110391
    Commented Sep 8, 2022 at 8:15

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I don't know the word for it or if one exists but you are potentially referring to an idea that has drawn a very large body of cognition research, so hopefully I can provide some pointers.

Abstraction of knowledge is a very influential idea in cognition research in general, for example, see schema theory (e.g. McVee, Dunsmore & Gavelek, 2005). Conceptual knowledge indeed affects attention (Johnston & Dark, 1986). The exact mechanisms are complex and up to debate, but empirical results do find that experts in a domain have distinctive organizational structures in perception, attention, and memory, for example in chess (Simon & Chase, 1973).

This is not, however, a complete view; there are other theories of cognitive representation as well, emphasizing examples, prototypes, or even specific examples rather than abstractions (search "exemplar theory" for an example). If you wish to dive into the literature, I suggest starting with reading an introductory textbook on cognitive psychology / cognitive science if you haven't already. "Knowledge representation" and "memory" are the topics most related to what you're asking.

References

McVee, M. B., Dunsmore, K., & Gavelek, J. R. (2005). Schema theory revisited. Review of educational research, 75(4), 531-566.

Johnston, W. A., & Dark, V. J. (1986). Selective attention. Annual review of psychology, 37(1), 43-75.

Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive psychology, 4(1), 55-81.

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  • $\begingroup$ Can you please provide reference information for McVee, Dunsmore & Gavelek, 2005; Johnston & Dark, 1986; and Simon & Chase, 1973? These inline citations can mean anything $\endgroup$
    – Chris Rogers
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 4:46
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    $\begingroup$ @ChrisRogers not exactly anything but done :) $\endgroup$
    – inu
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 12:11

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