Home > Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the psychological science which studies cognition, the mental processes that are hypothesised to underlie behaviour. This covers a broad range of research domains, examining questions about the workings of memory, attention, perception, knowledge representation, reasoning, creativity and problem solving.Cognitive psychology is radically different from previous psychological approaches in two keys ways.
- It accepts the use of the scientific method, and rejects introspection as valid methods of investigations, unlike phenomenological methods such as Freudian psychology.
- It posits the existence of internal mental states (such as beliefBelief is assent to a proposition. Belief in the psychological sense, is a representational mental state that takes the form of a propositional attitude. In the religious sense, "belief" refers to a part of a wider spiritual or moral foundation, generallys, desireDesire can refer to preference, on which microeconomic theory is based a concept of lack in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (for now, refer to the Oedipus complex) the concept of tanha in Buddhist psychology, as described in the Four Noble Truths. a Bob Dys and motivationIn psychology, motivation is the driving force ( desire) behind all actions of an organism. Motivation is based on emotions, specifically, on the search for positive emotional experiences and the avoidance of negative ones, where positive and negative ares) unlike behaviourist psychology.
The school of thought arising from this approach is known as cognitivismIn psychology cognitivism is a theoretical approach to understanding the mind, which argues that mental function can be understood by quantitative, positivist and scientific methods, and that such functions can be described as information processing model.
Cognitive psychology is one of the more recent additions to psychological research, having only developed as a separate area within the discipline since the late 1950sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s Years: 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 Events and trends Technology United States tests the first fusion bomb. and early 1960sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Years: 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around (though there are examples of cognitive thinking from earlier researchers). The term came into use with the publication of the book Cognitive psychology by Ulrich Neisser in 1967. However the cognitive approach was brought to prominence by Donald Broadbent's book Perception and Communication in 1958. Since that time, the dominant paradigm in the area has been the information processing model of cognition that Broadbent put forward. This is a way of thinking and reasoning about mental processes, envisaging them like software running on the computer that is the brain. Theories commonly refer to forms of input, representation, computation or processing, and outputs.
This way of conceiving mental processes has pervaded psychology more generally over the past few decades, and it is not uncommon to find cognitive theories within social psychology, personality, abnormal psychology, developmental psychology; the application of cognitive theories in comparative psychology has led to many recent studies in animal cognition.
The information processing approach to cognitive functioning is currently being questioned by new approaches in psychology, such as dynamical systems, and the embodiment perspective.
Because of the use of computational metaphors and terminology, cognitive psychology was able to benefit greatly from the flourishing of research in artificial intelligence and other related areas in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, it developed as one of the significant aspects of the inter-disciplinary subject of cognitive science, which attempts to integrate a range of approaches in research on the mind and mental processes.
