Introduction to cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the psychological science that studies cognition, the mental processes that underlie behavior, including thinking, reasoning, decision making, and to some extent motivation and emotion. Cognitive psychology covers a broad range of research domains, examining questions about the workings of memory, attention, perception, knowledge representation, reasoning, creativity and problem solving. The term Cognitive psychology came into use with the publication of the book Cognitive Psychology by Ulric Neisser in 1967, wherein Neisser provides a broad definition of cognitive psychology, emphasising that it is a point of view which postulates the mind as having a certain conceptual structure. Neisser's point of view endows the discipline a scope which expands beyond high-level concepts such as "reasoning", often espoused in other works in as a definition of cognitive psychology. Neisser's definition of cognition illustrates this well:

...the term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts.

Cognitive psychology is radically different from previous psychological approaches in two key ways.
 * It accepts the use of the scientific method, and generally rejects introspection as a valid method of investigation, unlike phenomenological methods such as Freudian psychology.
 * It explicitly acknowledges the existence of internal mental states (such as beliefs, desires and motivations) unlike behaviourist psychology.

The school of thought arising from this approach is known as cognitivism.

Cognitive psychology is one of the more recent additions to psychological research, having only developed as a separate area within the discipline since the late 1950s and early 1960s (though there are examples of cognitive thinking from earlier researchers). The cognitive approach was brought to prominence by Donald Broadbent's book Perception and Communication in 1958. Since that time, the dominant paradigm in the area has been the information processing model of cognition that Broadbent put forward. This is a way of thinking and reasoning about mental processes, envisaging them like software running on the computer that is the brain. Theories commonly refer to forms of input, representation, computation or processing, and outputs.

This way of conceiving mental processes has pervaded psychology more generally over the past few decades, and it is not uncommon to find cognitive theories within social psychology, personality, abnormal psychology, developmental psychology; the application of cognitive theories in comparative psychology has led to many recent studies in animal cognition.

The information processing approach to cognitive functioning is currently being questioned by new approaches in psychology, such as dynamical systems, and the embodiment perspective.

Because of the use of computational metaphors and terminology, cognitive psychology was able to benefit greatly from the flourishing of research in artificial intelligence and other related areas in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, it developed as one of the significant aspects of the inter-disciplinary subject of cognitive science, which attempts to integrate a range of approaches in research on the mind and mental processes.

Major research areas in cognitive psychology
Perception
 * Attention and Filter theories (the ability to focus mental effort on specific stimuli while excluding other stimuli from consideration)
 * Pattern recognition (the ability to correctly interpret ambiguous sensory information)
 * Object recognition

Categorization
 * Category induction and acquisition
 * Categorical judgement and classification
 * Category representation and structure

Memory
 * Short-term memory and long-term memory
 * Autobiographical memory
 * Episodic memory
 * Flashbulb memory
 * Semantic memory
 * Constructive memory
 * False memories
 * Encoding, storing and retrieving memory-based information

Knowledge representation
 * Mental imagery
 * Propositional encoding


 * Imagery versus proposition debate
 * Dual-coding theories
 * Mental models

Language
 * Grammar and linguistics
 * Phonetics and phonology
 * Language acquisition

Thinking
 * Logic, formal and natural reasoning
 * Concept formation
 * Problem solving
 * Judgment and decision making

Famous and/or influential cognitive psychologists

 * John R. Anderson
 * Alan Baddeley
 * Frederic Bartlett
 * Donald Broadbent
 * Jerome Bruner
 * Hermann Ebbinghaus
 * William Estes
 * Daniel Kahneman
 * George A. Miller
 * Ulrich Neisser
 * Allen Newell
 * Jean Piaget
 * Michael Posner
 * David Rumelhart
 * Daniel Schacter
 * Roger Shepard
 * Herbert Simon
 * Endel Tulving
 * Anne Treisman
 * Amos Tversky

Related lists

 * Important publications in cognitive psychology