Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is a form of discipline within psychology that touches all parts of the perceptual, memory an thinking processes. Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the thinking mind involving the total range of psychological processes. Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mind as an information processor. Cognitive psychologists try to build up cognitive models of the information processing that goes on inside people's minds, including perception, attention, language, memory, thinking and consciousness. Cognitive psychologists examine internal mental processes such as memory, perception, learning and language, and they are concerned with how people understand, diagnose, and solve problems and make decisions. Cognitive psychology generally favors the gathering of empirical data from scientific research methods instead of through clinically based observation (such as in the field of psychoanalysis) to reach conclusions and state a case. However, because cognitive psychology is a vast and diverse field, clinical observation can be useful in generating hypotheses for further research. The behaviorists approach only studies external observable (stimulus and response) behavior which can be objectively measured. They believe that internal behavior cannot be studied because we cannot see what happens in a person's mind (and therefore cannot objectively measure it). In comparison, the cognitive approach believes that internal mental behavior can be scientifically studied using experiments. Cognitive psychology assumes that a mediational process occurs between stimulus/input and response/output. This book is written for all those students who are associated with psychology. It is hoped that the contents of this book will explain different aspects of cognition and prepare you to comprehend future developments. An effort has been made to put a comprehensive view of cognitive psychology involving some of its multifarious components.