COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
BY ,
Akhila.k.s
Assisstant professor
MES College

WHAT IS COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY ?
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the
thinking mind and is concerned with ,
 How we attend to gain information about
the world
 How that information is stored and
processed
 How we solve problems, think and
formulate language

Cognitive psychology involves the total range of
Psychological processes from sensation to
perception,neuroscience,pattern recognition,
Attention, consciouness,learning, memory ,concept
formation,thinking,imaging,remembering,language,in
telligence,emotions and developmental processes and
cut across all the field of behavior.

THE DOMAINS OF COGNITIVE
PSYCHOLOGY
Modern cognitive psychology draws theories
and techniques from twelve principle areas of
research ,
• Cognitive neuroscience
• Perception
• Pattern recognition
• Attention
• Consciousness

• Memory
• Representation of knowledge
• Imagery
• Language
• Developmental psychology
• Thinking and concept formation
• Human and artificial intelligence

COGNITION IN THE RENAISSANCE
AND BEYOND
Renaissance philosophers and theologians
seemed generally satisfied that knowledge
was located in the brain.
During eighteenth century
when philosophic psychology was brought to
point where scientific psychology could
assume a role…

British empiricists –George Berkely,David Hume ,
and later James mill and his son John Stuart
Mill –suggested that internal representations
of three types;
 direct sensory events
 faint copies of percepts
 transformation of these faint copies

During nineteenth century
Psychologists started to break away from
philosophy to form a discipline based on
empirical results rather than on speculation .
Conspicuous as a factor in this emergence was
the activity of the early psychologists –gustav
fechner ,franz brentano,hermann helmiholtz
william wundt etc…

By the last half of nineteenth century ,theories
of the representation of knowledge were
clearly dichotomous; there were those ,led by
wundt in germany and titchener in the united
states ,that empasizhed the structure of
mental representation ; and those led by
Brentano in Austraila ,that emphasized the
processe or acts.

The early twentieth century
The representation of knowledge , as we have
used the term ,took a radical return with the
advent of twentieth century behaviorism and
gestalt psychology. The behaviorist view of
human and animal psychology were cast in a
framework of stimulus response psychology ,
and the gestalt theorists built elaborate
conceptualizations of internal representation
within the context of isomorphism.

Cognitive psychology – As it is today
In the 1950 s interest again began to focus on
attention ,memory ,pattern recognition,
semantic organization,images,thinking,
language process and even consciousness. As
cognitive psychology became established with
even greater clarity ,it was plain that this was a
brand of psychology different from that in
vogue during the 1930s and 1940s.

Among the most important forces accounting for
this neocognitive revolution were the following;
• The failure of behaviorism
• The emergence of communication theory
• Modern linguistics
• Memory research
• Computer science and technological advances
• Cognitive development

MODELS OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
The Information-Processing Approach
The information-processing approach dominated
cognitive psychology in the 1960s and 1970s and
remains strong and influential today (Atkinson &
Shiffrin, 1968). As its name implies, the information-
processing approach draws an analogy between
human cognition and computerized processing of
information. Central to the information-processing
approach is the idea that cognition can be thought of
as information (what we see, hear, read about, think
about) passing through a system (us or, more
specifically, our minds)

The connectionist approach
Early in the 1980s, researchers from a variety of disciplines
began to explore alternatives to the information-processing
approach that could explain cognition. The framework they
established is known as connectionism (sometimes also called
parallel-distributed processing, or PDP). Its name is derived
from models depicting cognition as a network of connections
among simple (and usually numerous) processing units
(McClelland, 1988). Because these units are sometimes
compared to neurons, the cells that transmit electrical impulses
and underlie all sensation and muscle movement, connectionist
models are sometimes called neural networks.

Each unit is connected to other units in a large
network. Each unit has some level of activation at
any particular moment in time. The exact level of
activation depends on the input to that unit from
both the environment and other units to which it is
connected. Connections between two units have
weights, which can be positive or negative. A
positively weighted connection causes one unit to
excite, or raise the level of activation of units to
which it is connected; a negatively weighted
connection has the opposite effect, inhibiting or
lowering the activation of connected units.

The evolutionary approch
• Evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides (1989)
notes that the environments our ancestors experienced
were not simply physical, but ecological and social as
well.
• Cosmides and Tooby (2002) argue that people have
“a large and heterogeneous set of evolved, reliably
developing, dedicated problem-solving programs,
each of which is specialized to solve a particular
domain or class of adaptive problems (e.g., grammar
acquisition, mate acquisition, food aversion, way
finding

The ecological approach
• The ecological paradigm stresses the ways in
which the environment and the context shape
the way cognitive processing occurs.