Cognitive psychology

Cognitive Psychology is a branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember, and learn. As part of the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics.

Overview

The core focus of cognitive psychology is on how people acquire, process and store information. There are numerous practical applications for cognitive research, such as improving memory, increasing decision-making accuracy, and structuring educational curricula to enhance learning.

History

Cognitive psychology began to emerge during the 1950s, partly as a response to behaviorism, which psychologists found to be an insufficiently comprehensive description of human behavior. Early work in the area of cognitive psychology was primarily experimental, investigating the areas of memory, attention, and problem-solving.

Key Concepts

Perception

Perception is the process of recognizing and interpreting sensory stimuli. Cognitive psychologists study how people make sense of their environment, how they encode, store, and retrieve information from memory, and how they use this information to guide their behavior.

Memory

Memory is the ability to encode, store, and retrieve information. Cognitive psychologists study memory to understand how memories are formed, stored, and retrieved.

Attention

Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. Cognitive psychologists study attention to understand how people manage the input from their environment and how they focus their mental resources.

Language

Language is a system of symbols and rules for combining these symbols in ways that can generate an almost infinite number of possible messages and meanings. Cognitive psychologists study language to understand how it is used to communicate, how it is learned, and how it is processed.

Methods

Cognitive psychologists often use laboratory experiments to study behavior, along with a range of other methods including case studies, computer simulation, and neuropsychological methods.

See Also

• Cognitive Science
• Behaviorism
• Perception
• Memory
• Attention
• Language