"Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flexibility of our species is owed at least in part to our starting off so well-informed; we are good learners because we know what to pay attention to and what questions are the right ones to ask." - paul bloom
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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 use cognition to refer to mental processes, primarily ones that involve thinking. Some of these mental processes include perception, attention, language and memory. The cognitive approach began to revolutionize psychology in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, to become the dominant approach in psychology by the late 1970s. Cognitive psychology acknowledges the thought process that goes into our behaviour, and the different moods that we experience that can impact on the way we respond to different kinds of circumstances. You could think of it as the cogs in our head turning over and over, putting together pieces of our lives and continuously making decisions for us on how we respond to real life situations.
The main subject matter of cognitive psychology hasn’t changed greatly since the perspective has been proposed. Cognitive psychologists main field is still focusing on mental processes that take place inside our brain. Basically, the emphasis of this field of psychology understands how we take in information in order to think, feel and behave as we do. A major assumption is that mental processes are an important field in its own right, as well as influences on our observable behaviour. Basically in order to know what makes people tick, we have to know what is actually going on in their brains and what emotions, behaviours etc. are causing it. Another major assumption is that ‘internal mental processes can be described in terms of rules or algorithms in information processing models’. Although this is a bit of a mouthful, it means that the data and research that comes from the practice of cognitive psychology can be evaluated and compared in a scientific manor, meaning that the psychology is a lot more based on scientific research then it is on studying physical human behaviour.
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In this illustration we can see a humans brain but in many different cogs. This fits in with cognitive psychology (as said before) because the perspective explains to us that we should look at the human brain like cogs that are continuously moving and turning and shaping us a person through our thinking, focus, and how we acquire, process, and use information and how we treat the information in order to think, feel and behave as we do. Everybody’s cogs and mental processes are different and this can be seen in the image with different cogs representing different schools of thought, emotion, behaviour etc. Many cognitive psychologists have explained mental processes by making comparisons between the human brain and a computer. This is because both things can receive, process, store and retrieve information. Fro example when we need information for thinking purposes such as solving a puzzling maths equation, we locate and retrieve it from where it is stored in the brain. Although the human mind is much more complex and sophisticated then that of a computer, people who adopt the perspective have found the information processing approach useful.
One way of thinking about memory organization is known as the semantic network theory. This theory explains and describes how to vast amounts of information stored in our memory is organised so that we can efficiently retrieve it when it is needed. According to the theory bits of information are clustered together and these are spread throughout an ‘interconnected’ network inside our brains (just like the cogs reference). The closer the relationship between the different pieces of information and feelings, the closer they will be in the network. This is one of the most respected theories in the field of cognitive psychology and is also one that is being continuously elaborated on even today. It shows us that all part of our brain our connected, it is just in us and in our emotions, feelings, responses etc. in which it comes out.
One way of thinking about memory organization is known as the semantic network theory. This theory explains and describes how to vast amounts of information stored in our memory is organised so that we can efficiently retrieve it when it is needed. According to the theory bits of information are clustered together and these are spread throughout an ‘interconnected’ network inside our brains (just like the cogs reference). The closer the relationship between the different pieces of information and feelings, the closer they will be in the network. This is one of the most respected theories in the field of cognitive psychology and is also one that is being continuously elaborated on even today. It shows us that all part of our brain our connected, it is just in us and in our emotions, feelings, responses etc. in which it comes out.