Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scienitific study of the mind as an information processor. Cognitive psychologists try to build up cognitive models of the information processing that goes on inside people’s minds, including perception, attention, language, memory, thinking and consciousness
The cognitive perspective applies a nomothetic approach to discover human cognitive processes, but have also adopted idiographic techniques through using case studies (e.g. KF, HM). Cognitive psychology is also a reductionist approach. This means that all behaviour, no matter how complex can be reduced to simple cognitive processes, like memory or perception.
Typically cognitive psychologists use the laboratory experiment to study behavior. This is because the cognitive approach is a scientific one. For example, participants will take part in memory tests in strictly controlled conditions. However, the widely used lab experiment can be criticized for lacking ecological validity (a major criticism of cognitive psychology).
Cognitive psychology became of great importance in the mid 1950s. Several factors were important in this:
- Dissatisfaction with the behaviorist approach in its simple emphasis on external behavior rather than internal processes.
- The development of better experimental methods.
- Comparison between human and computer processing of information.
The emphasis of psychology shifted away from the study of conditioned behaviour and psychoanalytical notions about the study of the mind, towards the understanding of human information processing, using strict and rigorous laboratory investigation.
Information Processing
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.
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.
The use of the computer as a tool for thinking how the human mind handles information is known as the computer analogy. Essentially, a computer codes (i.e. changes) information, stores information, uses information, and produces an output (retrieves info). The idea of information processing was adopted by cognitive psychologists as a model of how human thought works.
The information processing approach is based on a number of assumptions, including:
- Information made available from the environment is processed by a series of processing systems (e.g. attention, perception, short-term memory);
- These processing systems transform, or alter the information in systematic ways;
- The aim of research is to specify the processes and structures that underlie cognitive performance;
- Information processing in humans resembles that in computers.
Mediational Processes
The behaviorists approach only studies external observable (stimulus and response) behaviour which can be objectively measured. They believe that internal behaviour cannot be studied because we cannot see what happens in a person’s mind (and therefore cannot objectively measure it).
In comparison, the cognitive approach believes that internal mental behaviour can be scientifically studied using experiments. Cognitive psychology assumes that a mediational process occurs between stimulus/input and response/output.
The mediational (i.e. mental) event could be memory, perception, attention or problem solving etc. These are known as mediational processes because they mediate (i.e. go-between) between the stimulus and the response. They come after the stimulus and before the response.
Therefore, cognitive psychologists’ say if you want to understand behaviour, you have to understand these mediational processes.
