Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, language, and problem-solving. It focuses on how people acquire, process, and store information. This field explores how individuals think, reason, and make decisions, and it has applications in various areas including education, therapy, and human-computer interaction.
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10 Key excerpts on "Cognitive Psychology"
eBook - PDFCognitive Psychology
A Student's Handbook
- Michael W. Eysenck, Mark T. Keane(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
Approaches to human cognition INTRODUCTION We are now well into the third millennium and there is ever-increasing interest in unravelling the mysteries of the human brain and mind. This interest is reflected in the substantial upsurge of scientific research within Cognitive Psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In addition, the cognitive approach has become increasingly influential within clinical psychology. In that area, it is recognised that cognitive processes (especially cognitive biases) play a major role in the development (and successful treatment) of mental disorders (see Chapter 15). In similar fashion, social psychologists increasingly focus on social cognition. This focuses on the role of cognitive processes in influencing individuals’ behaviour in social situations. For example, suppose other people respond with laughter when you tell them a joke. This laughter is often ambiguous – they may be laughing with you or at you (Walsh et al., 2015). Your subsequent behaviour is likely to be influenced by your cognitive interpretation of their laughter. What is Cognitive Psychology? It is concerned with the internal pro- cesses involved in making sense of the environment and deciding on appropriate action. These processes include attention, perception, learn- ing, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning and thinking. We can define Cognitive Psychology as aiming to understand human cognition by observing the behaviour of people performing various cognitive tasks. However, the term “Cognitive Psychology” can also be used more broadly to include brain activity and structure as relevant information for under- standing human cognition. It is in this broader sense that it is used in the title of this book. Here is a simple example of Cognitive Psychology in action. Frederick (2005) developed a test (the Cognitive Reflection Test) that included the following item: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total.
eBook - PDFPsychology
Six Perspectives
- Dodge Fernald(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
Articles and editorials in The Woman caught Cognitive Psychology —— 217 Bertha’s attention. They increased her knowledge, strengthened her under-standing, and stimulated her resistance to a problem broader than her own: the plight of women throughout society. Foundations of Cognitive Psychology In modern psychology, knowledge and understanding are known as cognition. Thus Cognitive Psychology deals with knowing, understanding, and all other mental processes—including perception, memory, thinking, and numerous components of these major processes yet to be identified. Like the biological perspective, Cognitive Psychology is an extensive enterprise, a loose confederation of diverse interests so broad that it may seem more like a diverse subfield than a single systematic perspective in contemporary psy-chology. With the human mind as its subject of inquiry, cognitive psychol-ogy faces an immense challenge. Expressed in simpler terms that emphasize this breadth, modern Cognitive Psychology seeks to discover how knowledge is represented in the human mind (Mandler, 1985). Strictly speaking, cognitive psychologists study men-tal processes only, without concern for their biological background. They believe they can investigate the software, which is human cognitive ability, without substantial knowledge of how it would be implemented in the hardware, the human brain (Byrnes & Fox, 1998; Neisser, 1967). In a word, the focus is largely on consciousness—with practical applications in social behavior, school achievement, job performance, and other mental activities (Sternberg & Dennis, 1997). Cognitive Psychology stands in marked contrast to radical behaviorism, which concentrates on overt actions. The cognitive approach aims to dis-cover what goes on inside the “black box,” as the human mind has been called because of its mysterious, seemingly inaccessible state.
eBook - PDF- Nancy Ogden, Michael Boyes, Evelyn Field, Ronald Comer, Elizabeth Gould(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used” (Neisser, 1967, p. 4). Neisser went on to define Cognitive Psychology as the study of information processing, the means by which information is stored and operates internally. Despite its unpopular beginning, the cognitive perspective is currently the prevailing perspective in psychology. Cognition is defined as the mental processes involved in knowing, perceiving, and remembering and includes research in areas such as decision making, problem solving, and understanding language. Many cognitive psychologists compare the human mind to a com- puter, likening mental processes to the mind’s software and the human nervous system to the system’s hardware. Early cognitive psychologists reasoned that if modifying software can control the “behaviour” of computers, identifying and modifying specific mental processes ought to control human behaviour. Cognitive Psychology has become the dominant model of the mind. Not surprisingly given their focus, cognitive psychologists focused their attention on the functioning of cognitive mechanisms rather than on their content. Cognitive researchers were able to observe the “inputs” and “outputs” of the mental system through carefully controlled experimentation, and then to theorize about the internal mechanisms that must underlie such mental functioning. Cognitive Psychology continues to influence contemporary theory and research into memory, perception, and consciousness, among other areas that we will discuss throughout the text. The rigorous experimental standards established by cognitive scientists continue to define current methods for studying how information is stored and manipulated by the brain across different situations. Moreover, at the core of a relatively new field called cultural psychology is an interest in how cognitive processing may vary across different populations due to the influences of their distinct socio-cultural environments.
eBook - PDF- Thomas A. Farmer, Margaret W. Matlin(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Perspectives on Cognitive Psychology Cognitive Psychology is part of a broad field known as cognitive science. Cognitive science is an inter- disciplinary field that tries to answer questions about the inner workings of the mind. Cognitive science includes contributions from Cognitive Psychology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, and lin- guistics. In some cases, researchers in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and economics also make contributions to the field of cognitive science. This field emerged when researchers began to notice con- nections among a variety of disciplines, and thus began to collaborate with one another (Bermúdez, 2020; Sobel, 2001; Thagard, 2005). According to cognitive scientists, thinking requires us to manipulate our internal representations of the external world. Cognitive scientists focus on these internal representations. Cognitive scientists value interdisciplinary studies, and they try to build bridges among the academic areas. Both the theory and the research in cognitive science are so extensive that no one person could possibly master everything (Bermúdez, 2020; Sobel, 2001; Thagard, 2005). However, if all these different fields remain separate, then cognitive scientists won’t achieve important insights and identify relevant connections. Therefore, cognitive science tries to coordinate the information that researchers have gathered throughout each con- tributing discipline. Below, we discuss two differing large-scale theoretical frameworks that have been used to ground our understanding of results from Cognitive Psychology experiments. You will see hints of these accounts as experiments are discussed throughout the remainder of this book. We conclude this second main section of Chapter 1 by considering some ways that neuroscientific observations have contributed to research on cognitive processes.
eBook - PDF- Thomas A. Farmer, Margaret W. Matlin(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Additionally, we detail the large number of learning features that are built into this textbook. Their design is based on research in areas of Cognitive Psychology, such as human memory, and will help you to maximize the amount of information that you maintain as you read. An Introduction to Cognitive Psychology AN INTRODUCTION TO Cognitive Psychology 2 What Is Cognitive Psychology? The term cognition, or mental activity, refers to the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowl- edge. Although many have argued that nonhuman animals also have cognitive abilities, our focus here is on the inner workings of the human mind. You will likely have the opportunity to learn more about nonhuman animal cognition in other courses offered by the Psychology and Biology departments at your university. Cognition is inescapable. At any point that you are awake, your cognitive processes are at work. They grant you the ability to recognize and interpret stimuli in your environment and to act (or react) strategi- cally to environmental input. Cognitive processes afford you the ability to plan, to create, to interact with others, and to process all of the thoughts, sensations, and emotions that you experience on a daily basis. Your cognitive abilities operate together in intricate and highly coordinated ways to create your conscious experiences. While reading this paragraph, for example, you are performing multiple cognitive tasks at the same time. In order to reach this paragraph, you used pattern recognition to create words from an assortment of squiggles and lines that form the letters on this page. You also consulted your memory and your knowledge about language to search for word meanings and to link together the ideas in this paragraph. Addition- ally, right now, as you think about these cognitive tasks, you are engaging in another cognitive task called metacognition—you were thinking about your own thought processes.
eBook - PDF- Margaret W. Matlin(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Furthermore, Cognitive Psychology is part of an active interdisciplinary area known as cognitive science. This introductory chapter also gives you a preview of the chapters in this book and an overview of five themes in Cognitive Psychology. The chapter concludes with some tips on how to make the best use of your textbook’s special features. INTRODUCING Cognitive Psychology At this exact moment, you are actively performing several cognitive tasks. In order to reach this second sentence of the first paragraph, you used pattern recognition to create words from an assortment of squiggles and lines that form the letters on this page. You also consulted your memory and your knowledge about language to search for word meanings and to link together the ideas in this paragraph into a coherent message. Right now, as you think about these cognitive tasks, you are engaging in another cognitive task called metacognition; you were thinking about your thought processes. Perhaps you made an inference such as, ‘‘This book may help me study more effectively.’’ You may also have used decision making, for instance, by saying to yourself, ‘‘I’ll finish this section of the book before I go to lunch.’’ Cognition, or mental activity, describes the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge. If cognition operates every time you acquire some information, place it in storage, transform that information, and use it . . . then cognition definitely includes a wide range of mental processes! This textbook will explore mental processes such as perception, memory, imagery, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making. A related term, Cognitive Psychology, has two meanings: (1) Sometimes it is a synonym for the word cognition, and so it refers to the variety of mental activities we just listed. (2) Sometimes it refers to a particular theoretical approach to psychology.
- Lorelle J. Burton, Drew Westen, Robin M. Kowalski(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Pdf_Folio:19 CHAPTER 1 Psychology: the study of mental processes and behaviour 19 The cognitive perspective is useful not only in examining memory but also in understanding processes such as decision making. When people enter a car showroom, they have a set of attributes in their minds: for example, smooth ride, sleek look, good fuel economy, affordable price. They must also process a great deal of new information (the car dealer’s description of one model as a ‘real steal’, for instance) and match it with stored linguistic knowledge. This allows them to comprehend the meaning of the dealer’s speech, such as the connotation of ‘real steal’ (from both his viewpoint and theirs). In deciding which car to buy, they must somehow integrate information about multiple attributes and weigh their importance. As we will see, some of these processes are conscious or explicit, whereas others happen through the silent whirring of our neural ‘engines’. APPLY AND DISCUSS A four-year-old is about to grab a lolly off the shelf at a shop, and his older sister says, ‘No, don’t take that. That would be stealing’. • How would a psychologist from a behaviourist perspec- tive explain both children’s behaviour? How did their learning history shape their actions? • How would a psychologist from a cognitive perspective explain their behaviour? What made the four-year-old think that inside this lolly wrapper would be something tasty? How did the older child learn to resist such temptations and to view stealing as wrong? Origins of the cognitive perspective The philosophical roots of the cognitive perspective lie in a series of questions about where knowledge comes from that the ancient Greek philosophers first raised and that British and European philosophers pondered during the last four centuries (see Gardner, 1985).
eBook - PDFPsychological Science
The Curious Mind
- Catherine A. Sanderson, Karen R. Huffman(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
222 Why Study Cognitive Processes? In Pillar 1, we explored the biological processes of the human brain. Now, in Pillar 2, we examine our cognitive processes—how the three pounds of biological tissue lying within our skull and floating around in total darkness take in and transform information from the out- side world, thus allowing us to think, remember, and learn. People in virtually all professions, including psychologists, psychiatrists, educators, scientists, judges, engineers, architects, and politicians, have a compelling interest in our cognitive processes, knowing that in large part we are what our brains process and what we think. The word cognition derives from the Latin cogito, which literally means “to think,” and as the famous philosopher Descartes declared: “I think, therefore I am—cogito ergo sum!” We begin Pillar 2 with Chapter 6 Cognition and Intelligence, which focuses on what cog- nition is and where it’s located. Then we probe the nature of mental images and concepts, fol- lowed by problem solving, decision making, creativity, and intelligence. Chapter 7 Perception PILLAR 2 Cognitive Ch. 3 Neuroscience Ch. 4 Sensation Ch. 5 Consciousness Ch. 15 Psychological Disorders Ch. 16 Therapies Ch. 17 Health, Stress, and Coping Pillar 5 Mental and Physical Health Pillar 4 Social and Personality Pillar 3 Developmental Ch. 6 Cognition and Intelligence Ch. 7 Perception Ch. 8 Memory Pillar 1 Biological Pillar 2 Cognitive Ch. 9 Learning Ch. 10 Life Span Development and Language Psychological Science: The Curious Mind Six Integrative Themes Ch. 11 Motivation, Emotion, and Sexuality Ch. 12 Personality Ch. 13 Social Psychology Ch. 14 Industrial/ Organizational Psychology Foundation Unit: Ch. 1 Introducing Psychology + Ch. 2 Research Methods 223 explores how our brain selects, organizes, and interprets (or assigns meaning to) the vast amount of information we receive from our senses.
eBook - PDF- Margaret W. Matlin, Thomas A. Farmer(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
4. The approach called “computer simulation” attempts to design programs that accomplish cognitive tasks the way that humans do. 5. According to the computer metaphor, human cognitive processes work like a computer that can process information quickly and accurately. 6. According to the information-processing approach, mental processes operate like a computer, with information lowing through a series of storage areas. 3. It’s useful to study Cognitive Psychology because (a) cognitive activities are a major part of human psychology, (b) the cognitive approach inluences other important areas of psychology, and (c) you can learn how to use your cognitive processes more effectively. 35 The Relationship Between Mind, Brain, and Behavior 7. Enthusiasm for the classic information processing approach has declined, because cognitive psychologists now realize that human thinking requires more complex models. 8. Cognitive Psychology has had a major inluence on the ield of psychology. In the current era, cognitive psychologists are more concerned about ecological validity than in previous decades. 9. According to the connectionist approach, cognitive processes can be represented in terms of networks of neurons; furthermore, many operations can proceed at the same time, in parallel, rather than one step at a time. 10. The area of cognitive neuroscience combines the research techniques of cogni- tive psychology with a variety of methods for assessing the brain’s structure and function. 11. Brain lesions, PET-scans, and the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are cognitive neuroscientiic methodologies that provide information about which brain structure are involved in cognitive processing; fMRI is now more commonly used than PET scans. 12. The event-related potential technique uses electrodes to track the very brief changes in the brain’s electrical activity, in response to speciic stimuli.
eBook - PDFCognition
The Thinking Animal
- Daniel T. Willingham, Cedar Riener(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
1 Cognitive Psychologists’ Approach to Research Introduction Why Make Assumptions? How Did Philosophers and Early Psychologists Study the Mind? • Philosophical underpinnings • The beginnings of modern psychology • The response: behaviorism • Behaviorism’ s success How Do Cognitive Psychologists Study the Mind? • What behaviorism couldn’t do • Failures of behaviorism to account for human behavior • The computer metaphor and information processing • The behaviorist response • Abstract constructs in other fields • So what, finally, is the cognitive perspective? Introduction When you are driving and your mind wanders from the song on the radio, to the next left turn you have to make, to what’ s for dinner, do you pause in the middle to wonder what makes your mind wander? Probably not. Most of the people we know do contemplate how the mind works, but only when their mind lets them down. They contemplate memory (“Why can’ t I remember the answer to this test question?”), attention (“I want to understand this material, so why can’ t I keep my focus on my book and not on my phone?”), and vision (“How could someone think those two colors go well together?”). Questions such as “How does vision work?” seem somewhat interesting, but no more interesting than thousands of other questions about how the world works (how do viruses work? How do cell phones work? How do your lungs work?). These questions become interesting to most people when they consider how the answers might help their own lives. For example, if we understood how vision worked, maybe we could build cars that can see (see Figure 1.1). To scientists, these questions are the fascinating entry into a world of other questions. Once we start looking a little closer and more systematically (by using the methods of science) we can uncover answers to these vital questions, but we also discover new layers of questions.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
