Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology
Type of psychology: Cognition
Fields of study: Cognitive processes; thought
Cognitive psychology is concerned with the scientific study of human mental activities
involved in the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information. Among its wide
concerns are perception, memory, reasoning, problem solving, intelligence, language,
and creativity; research in these areas has widespread practical applications.
Key concepts
• artificial intelligence
• cognitive behavioral therapy
• cognitive science
• episodic memory
• long-term memory
• metamemory
• prospective memory
• semantic memory
• short-term memory
• working memory
Cognitive psychology is that branch of psychology concerned with human
mental activities. A staggering array of topics fit under such a general heading.
In fact, it sometimes seems that there is no clear place to end the catalog
of cognitive topics, as mental operations intrude into virtually all human endeavors.
As a general guideline, one might consider the subject matter of
cognitive psychology as those mental processes involved in the acquisition,
storage, retrieval, and use of information.
Among the more specific concerns of cognitive psychologists are perception,
attention, memory, and imagery. Studies of perception and attention
might be concerned with how much of people’s vast sensory experience
they can further process and make sense of, and how they recognize incoming
information as forming familiar patterns. Questions regarding the quality
of memory include how much information can be maintained, for how
long, and under what conditions; how information is organized in memory
and how is it retrieved or lost; and how accurate the memory is, as well as
what can be done to facilitate a person’s recall skills. Cognitive researchers
concerned with imagery are interested in people’s ability to “see” in their
minds a picture or image of an object, person, or scene that is not physically
present; cognitive researchers are interested in the properties of such images
and how they can be manipulated.
In addition to these concerns, there is great interest in the higher-order
processes of planning, reasoning, problem solving, intelligence, language,
and creativity. Cognitive psychologists want to know, for example, what steps are involved in planning a route to a destination or a solution to a problem,
and what factors influence people’s more abstract ability to reason. They
seek to understand the importance of prior knowledge or experience, to
discover which strategies are effective, and to see what obstacles typically impede
a person’s thinking. They are interested in the relationships between
language and thought and between creativity and intelligence.
The following exchange is useful in illustrating some of the topics important
to cognitive psychologists. Imagine that “Jacob” and “Janet” are two
children on a busy playground:
Jacob: Do you want to play some football?
Janet: Sure! Tell me where the ball is and I’ll go get it.
Jacob: The football’s in my locker in the equipment room. Go back in the building.
Go past our classroom, turn right at the water fountain, and it’s the
second door on your left. My locker is number 12, and the combination is 6-
21-13.
Janet: Okay, it’ll just take me a couple of minutes. [As she runs to get the ball,
Janet repeats over and over to herself, “12; 6, 21, 13. . . .”]
Jacob: [shouting] The football field’s being watered; meet me in the gym.
Even such a simple encounter involves and depends upon a rich assortment
of cognitive skills. At a basic level, Jacob and Janet have to be aware of
each other. Their sensory systems allow the detection of each other, and
their brains work on the raw data (information) from the senses in order to
perceive or interpret the incoming information. In this case, the data are
recognized as the familiar patterns labeled “Jacob” and “Janet.” During the
course of the brief conversation, the children must also attend to (concentrate
on) each other, and in doing so they may be less attentive to other detectable
sights and sounds of their environment.
This scenario illustrates the use of more than one type of memory. Janet
stores the locker number and combination in short-term memory (STM),
and she maintains the information by rehearsing it. After Janet retrieves the
ball and redirects her attention to choosing teams for the football game, she
may forget this information. Jacob does not need to rehearse his combination
continually to maintain it; rather, his frequent use of his combination
and the meaningfulness of this information have helped him to store it in
long-term memory (LTM). If someone later asks Janet where she got the
football, she will retrieve that information from her episodic LTM. Episodic
memory holds information about how things appeared and when they occurred;
it stores things that depend on context. The language comprehension
of the children also illustrates another type of LTM. Semantic LTM, or
semantic memory, holds all the information they need in order to use language;
it includes not only words and the symbols for them, their meaning
and what they represent but also the rules for manipulating them. When
Janet hears the words “football,” “water fountain,” and “locker,” she effortlessly retrieves their meanings from LTM. Furthermore, metamemory, an
understanding of the attributes of one’s own memories, is demonstrated.
Janet knows to rehearse the combination to prevent forgetting it.
Jacob probably employed mental imagery and relied on a cognitive map
in order to direct Janet to the equipment room. From his substantial mental
representation of the school environment, Jacob retrieved a specific route,
guided by a particular sequence of meaningful landmarks. In addition to
their language capabilities and their abilities to form and follow routes, a
number of other higher-level mental processes suggest something of the intelligence
of these children. They appear to be following a plan that will result
in a football game. Simple problem solving is demonstrated by Janet’s
calculation of how long it will take to retrieve the football and in Jacob’s decision
to use the gym floor as a substitute for the football field.