WHAT IS COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY?

Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as perceiving, remembering, and reasoning.

Why do psychologists’ study mental processes?

Since the beginning of recorded history, people have expressed curiosity about the operation of the mind, largely because they believed that behaviour is the result of mental processes.

A cognitive psychologist might study how people perceive various shapes, why they remember some facts but forget others, or how they learn language. Consider some examples of everyday experiences

1. How many times have you carefully proofread written work, only to be embarrassed later by an obvious error you overlooked? Many times what we see is determined as much by the context in which it occurs as by what is actually there, an issue of pattern recognition.

2. Have you noticed the difficulty of simultaneously taking notes in class and understanding a lecture? Explanations of this kind of difficulties are found in the discussion of attention.

3. When you dial the telephone directory assistance for a telephone number and do not have a pen to note it down, why do you have to repeat the number until you have dialled it? And why you have to make your call again to enquire the number if someone talks to you before you dial the number? These are problems associated with the short term memory.

4. Do you remember the experience of working on a problem or a puzzle that you were unable to solve, but after taking a break from the problem, you subsequently obtained a solution? This phenomenon, known as incubation effect, along with other commonly experienced events is an aspect of problem solving.

5. Why do objects look farther away on foggy days than they really are? This discrepancy of perception can be dangerous, even deceiving drivers into having accidents.

These are just a few of the many examples of everyday experiences which are discussed and explored by the experiments and theory of cognitive psychology

References

Hunt, R. R., & Ellis, H.C. (2006). Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology. New Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill.

Kellogg, R.T. (2007). Cognitive Psychology. London: Sage Publications.

Reed, S.K. (2010). Cognition: Theories and Applications. London: Cengage. Solso, R.L. (2006). Cognitive Psychology. New Delhi: Pearson Education. Sternberg, R.J. (2009). Applied Cognitive Psychology: Perceiving, Learning, and Remembering. London: Cengage.

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