Cognitive Approach to Psychology

1
Cognitive Approach to Psychology

• A lot of what we learn is not shown by our
  actions but by our
• thinking.
• Cognitive psychology focuses on
• the mental processing of information
• and cognitive psychologists believe that the
  events within a person are at least as
  important as events outside a person in
  understanding behaviour. These internal events
  are referred to as
• mediators they come between the external
  stimulus and the response.
• External stimulus via mediators
  Response

2

• This approach is concerned with the acquisition,
  storage, retrieval and use of knowledge.
  Cognitive psychologists study how we process
  information from our environment, using the
  mental processes of-
• Perception
• taking in and making sense of info.
• Attention
• allows us to focus on one or more sources of
  info from many possible sources around us.
• Memory
• taking in, storing and retrieving info.
• Thinking
• range of mental activities e.g. decision
  making and problem solving.
• Language
• use of symbols to manipulate info and convey it
  to others.

3

• The cognitive approach developed partly as a
  reaction against
• behaviourism
• which had ignored internal processes in favour of
  observable behaviour.
• Stimulus response psychology has been likened to
  a switchboard-

Series of cross-connections in the brain
Response out
Stimulus in
4

• In cognitive processing the output represents a
  qualitative change in the input-

Information is processed in some way
Output
Input
The response depends upon the nature of the
internal processes. This internal element is seen
as active and creative so human behaviour is
seen as more flexible than in the Behaviourist
approach.
5

• The major perspective used by cognitive
  psychologists is the
• information processing approach,
• which was derived from computer science.
• According to this approach we gather information
  from the environment then process it in a
  sequence of stages.
• One type of processing is performed at one level
  before the information is passed to another level
  for a different kind of processing.
• The information processing approach is based on
  the idea that humans act like computers as far as
  cognitive processes are concerned.
• In the 1960s computer simulation was developed
  where computer programs could model simple
  cognitive processes. This developed into
  Artificial Intelligence (AI).

6

• The cognitive approach has become the dominant
  approach in many areas of psychology.
• Groome et al (1999 we can divide cognitive
  psychology into three areas-
• Experimental cognitive psychology
• uses the experimental method to explore mental
  processing. Cannot look at cognitive processes
  directly but can do so indirectly by observing
  the results of processing information e.g.
  memory experiments.
• 2. Cognitive science -
• computer simulations of human cognitive
  processes.
• 3. Cognitive neuropsychology
• looks at cognitive processes in the living brain
  e.g. identifying deficits that occur due to brain
  damage.

7

• An important practical application of the
  cognitive approach is in helping the police to
  develop an interview technique called the
  cognitive interview technique, which helps them
  get more accurate information from witnesses to
  crimes. (see page 331 in your book).
• An example of the cognitive perspective can be
  seen in the topic, Memory Forgetting which we
  studied earlier in the year.