Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
[1] Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science.
This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics, as well as applied psychology, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior.
[3] From that time, major debates ensued through the 19th century regarding whether human thought was solely experiential (empiricism), or included innate knowledge (nativism).
[4] With the philosophical debate continuing, the mid to late 19th century was a critical time in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline.
Initially, its adherents viewed mental events such as thoughts, ideas, attention, and consciousness as unobservable, hence outside the realm of a science of psychology.
Those processes include, but are not limited to, the following three stages of memory:[citation needed] The psychological definition of attention is "a state of focused awareness on a subset of the available sensation perception information".
A number of early studies dealt with the ability of a person wearing headphones to discern meaningful conversation when presented with different messages into each ear; this is known as the dichotic listening task.
[4] Key findings involved an increased understanding of the mind's ability to both focus on one message, while still being somewhat aware of information being taken in from the ear not being consciously attended to.
For example, participants (wearing earphones) may be told that they will be hearing separate messages in each ear and that they are expected to attend only to information related to basketball.
[citation needed] One of the classic experiments is by Ebbinghaus, who found the serial position effect where information from the beginning and end of the list of random words were better recalled than those in the center.
Structuralism dealt heavily with trying to reduce human thought (or "consciousness", as Titchener would have called it) into its most basic elements by gaining an understanding of how an individual perceives particular stimuli.
Significant work has focused on understanding the timing of language acquisition and how it can be used to determine if a child has, or is at risk of, developing a learning disability.
Factors such as individual variability, socioeconomic status, short-term and long-term memory capacity, and others must be included in order to make valid assessments.
Beck cites (in 1987) that only 60 to 65% of patients respond to antidepressants, and recent meta-analyses (a statistical breakdown of multiple studies) show very similar numbers.[29]2.
[33] The development of multiple social information processing (SIP) models has been influential in studies involving aggressive and anti-social behavior.
One of the major paradigms of developmental psychology, the Theory of Mind (ToM), deals specifically with the ability of an individual to effectively understand and attribute cognition to those around them.
[36] One of the foremost minds with regard to developmental psychology, Jean Piaget, focused much of his attention on cognitive development from birth through adulthood.
Some of the most prominent concepts include: Cognitive therapeutic approaches have received considerable attention in the treatment of personality disorders in recent years.
The approach focuses on the formation of what it believes to be faulty schemata, centralized on judgmental biases and general cognitive errors.
Cognitive science is better understood as predominantly concerned with a much broader scope, with links to philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and particularly with artificial intelligence.
[41] Cognitive scientists' research sometimes involves non-human subjects, allowing them to delve into areas which would come under ethical scrutiny if performed on human participants.
[citation needed] Some observers have suggested that as cognitive psychology became a movement during the 1970s, the intricacies of the phenomena and processes it examined meant it also began to lose cohesion as a field of study.
"[3] This misfortune produced competing models that questioned information-processing approaches to cognitive functioning such as Decision Making and Behavioral Sciences.
In the early years of cognitive psychology, behaviorist critics held that the empiricism it pursued was incompatible with the concept of internal mental states.
For example, advocates of mental model theory have attempted to find evidence that deductive reasoning is based on image thinking, while the advocates of mental logic theory have tried to prove that it is based on verbal thinking, leading to a disorderly picture of the findings from brain imaging and brain lesion studies.
When theoretical claims are put aside, the evidence shows that interaction depends on the type of task tested, whether of visuospatial or linguistical orientation; but that there is also an aspect of reasoning which is not covered by either theory.
