Cognitive approach in psychology

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The cognitive perspective to psychology began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it only became clear and important for research in the 1970s.

Cognitive psychology is used to study the mental processes of a person. The idea is that the mind has a sort of mental state which makes it able to believe desire and intent. It is like comparing a human mind to a computer by saying that we are also information processors and that we can study the internal mental processes that are in the stimuli and the responses we make. The word “Cognition” means “the process of knowing” so therefore the cognitive process is associated to the ways, in which knowledge is used, retained and gained. Cognitive psychologists have researched and studied attention, perception, thinking, language, memory, attention and problem solving. Emotion was not considered a cognitive process. All in all, the cognitive psychology studies to understand the thinking process that influence our actions and behaviour.

“...cognition refers to all those processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used...cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do.” – Neisser (1966)

Cognitive psychology is fundamentally different from the other psychological approaches in two ways:

(1) Unlike the phenomenological methods such as the Freudian theory, Cognitive Psychology admits the use of the scientific method and denies introspection as a suitable method of investigation.

(2) It considers the existence of inner mental states such as beliefs, desires and motivations unlike behaviourist psychology. The school that studies the cognitive approach is called “Cognitivism”.

The methods of investigation used by the cognitive psychologists are:

Experimentation: this is usually performed in the laboratory. For an example the memory experiments are carried out under strictly controlled circumstances where the independent variables are manoueuvered to look for the effect on the number of information sustained.

Case studies: for an example the research of the brain damaged patients like those diagnosed with anyterograde amnesia in memory study.

With the study and use of cognitive perspective, scientists were able to analyze memory, attention, perception, social cognition, artificial intelligence and abnormality.

[edit] What the cognitive perspective provided to the world

• It helped improve memory through methods such as mnemonics and also helped the police with eyewitness testimonies.
• The information processing argument has been utilized to help in education.
• More effectiveness in therapy when using the cognitive behavioral approach.
• It also helped promote health with the health belief model and the pursued health advice.

Some of the important cognitive psychologists should be mentioned. They include Atkinson and Shriffin, Gregory, Broedbent and Rumelhart and McClelland.

Atkinson and Shriffin created a model in 1968m the Multi-store model of memory. It consists of 3 permanent structural components; sensory, short term (STM) and long term (LTM) memory. The model basically states that information is processed and stored in 3 distinct stages (in the brain/mind) (memory). Gregory’s theory that he proposed in 1973 presents perception in ways of hypothesis forming and testing. The idea of his theory is that our retinal image (sight) interacts with prior knowledge to make “psychological data”, as in the information we know (perception). Donald Broadbent was one of the presenters of early theories of selective attention. He presented a Filet Model in 1958 and claimed that physical characteristics (pitch, loudness) of an audio message were used to focus attention on a single message (attention). Rumelhart and McClelland in 1986 presented a parallel distributed network model that claims the intuition that “kids inflect new verbs like the ones they already know” (artificial intelligence).

Cognitive psychology has much strength as it is said to be the dominant approach these days^{[citation needed]}. It mainly researches a lot of fields of interest in psychology that have been left out by behaviorism but it researches them by using allegedly more accurate scientific methods. Also, the approach has given explanations of a lot of features on human behavior. But there are also some weaknesses that cognitive examples have been blamed for such as too simple, unrealistric, over hypothetical and too cold. Some say the approach is too simplistic because it ignores the very complicated human actions compared to computer actions. They also say that it is too cold, meaning they are ignoring the emotional side of humans, their consciousness and free will. But just as all the other psychology approaches, it will be argued forever, but still used. Some like it and some do not, but in the end, it is a very important part of psychology^{[citation needed]}.