COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes. It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.

Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways.

• It accepts the use of the scientific method, and generally rejects introspection as a valid method of investigation - in contrast with such approaches as Freudian psychology.
• It explicitly acknowledges the existence of internal mental states (such as belief, desire, idea, knowledge and motivation).

The term cognitive psychology came into use with the publication of the book Cognitive Psychology by Ulric Neisser in 1967. Cognitive Psychology revolves around the notion that if we want to know what makes people tick then we need to understand the internal processes of their mind. Cognition literally means “knowing”.  In other words, psychologists from this approach study cognition which is ‘the mental act or process by which knowledge is acquired.’

The cognitive approach began to revolutionize psychology in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, to become the dominant approach (i.e. perspective) in psychology by the late 1970s.  Interest in mental processes had been gradually restored through the work of Piaget and Tolman.  Other factors were important in the early development of the cognitive approach.  For example, dissatisfaction with the behaviorist approach in its simple emphasis on behavior rather than internal processes and the development of better experimental methods.  But it was the arrival of the computer that gave cognitive psychology the terminology and metaphor it needed to investigate the human mind.  The start of the use of computers allowed psychologists to try to understand the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with something simpler and better understood i.e. an artificial system such as a computer.

Carl Rogers believes that the use of laboratory experiments by cognitive psychology have low ecological validity and create an artificial environment due to the control over variables.  Rogers emphasizes a more holistic approach to understanding behavior. The information processing paradigm of cognitive psychology views that minds in terms of a computer when processing information.  However, there are important difference between humans and computers.  The mind does not process information like a computer as computers don’t have emotions or get tired like humans. Behaviorism assumes that people are born a blank slate (tabula rasa) and are not born with cognitive functions like schemas, memory or perception. The cognitive approach does not always recognize physical (re: biological psychology) and environmental (re: behaviorism) factors in determining behavior.