Psychology is one of the most ramified sciences, in which there are many currents that use different approaches to understanding the human psyche. Cognitive psychology is one of the youngest and most promising areas, which, nevertheless, has received quite a lot of followers.
Cognitive psychology is devoted to the study of cognitive processes in the human psyche. It includes the study of memory, feelings, attention, imagination, logical thinking, and decision-making ability.
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Despite the rather simple ideas, this area includes a lot of scientific research at the most serious level.
Concept
Cognitive psychology is understood as a branch of psychology that studies the cognitive processes that occur in the mind of an individual.
Its essence lies in the study of man as a kind of computer , the basis of which is thinking and reason.
It perceives various signals coming from the outside world, perceives and converts them into information, processes, analyzes and organizes it.
The subject of cognitive psychology is the study of such elements as imagination, consciousness, attention, memory, sensation, as well as other thought processes.
general description
Reverse psychology
The cognitive direction in psychology studies cognitive activity. It conventionally distinguishes two groups of processes: sensory and brain with consciousness. The first is responsible for receiving information from the outside, the second is for processing. The cognitive approach in psychology studies memory, perception, thinking, imagination, sensation.
Important! The discipline involves fields such as linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience and others.
This direction is very relevant in the modern world. It allows you to work on improving artificial intelligence. This is used not only to create robots, but also to develop interactive prostheses.
Cognitive psychology is a special direction in science. Its followers believe that knowledge of the world around us begins with impressions.
Through sensory perception, knowledge is transformed
After the accumulation of certain information, behavior, especially social behavior, is regulated. All processes are in constant motion, and studying them is not so easy.
History of origin
This trend originated not so long ago, in the middle of the 20th century. Researchers became interested in an individual's cognitive abilities and how they functioned.
Perception has been identified as a fundamental act of the human psyche. Scientists conducted various experiments to identify the boundaries of the abilities of the mind, attention, and memory.
The founders of cognitive psychology are psychologists F. Heider and L. Festinger.
But the further development of the direction was helped by a meeting held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956.
It addressed issues of memory functioning and language formation. , the Center for Cognitive Psychology was created , which studied the processes of thinking and cognition.
What is cognitive psychology, where did it come from and where is it going? Find out from the video:
Concept and brief history of cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychological science that studies the cognitive processes of the human psyche. Research based on the cognitive approach in psychology is focused on the study of feelings, attention, memory, imagination, logical thinking, presentation of information, and the ability to make decisions. In fact, this is a whole concept focused on the activity of consciousness and the process of cognition.
Cognitive psychology studies the process of a person obtaining information about the world, how it is presented to them, how it is stored in memory and becomes knowledge, as well as how this knowledge affects a person’s behavior and attention. This direction concerns the entire range of mental processes, starting with sensations and ending with perception, attention, learning, pattern recognition, memory, and concept formation. It concerns thinking, language, memory, imagination, emotions and developmental processes, as well as all possible behavioral areas.
This trend appeared in the 50s of the 20th century in the USA. Although, of course, attempts to study the problems of consciousness have been made before. Even ancient philosophers asked questions about where thoughts and memory are located. For example, in Ancient Egypt they were believed to be located in the heart. Aristotle also supported this idea. However, Plato believed that the place where they are stored is the brain. Without going into details, we can say that people showed great interest in the problem of consciousness hundreds of years before cognitive psychology developed into a scientific field.
Considerable credit for the development of cognitive science belongs to such famous philosophers as Immanuel Kant, David Hume and Rene Descartes. Thus, Descartes' theory of mental structure eventually became a method for studying the psyche. Hume's work contributed to the establishment of laws of association of ideas and the classification of mental processes. And Kant pointed out that reason is a structure, and experience is the facts that fill this structure. But, naturally, it is wrong to believe that only these people should be thanked for the development of cognitive psychology. The activities of scientists from other fields also played a huge role.
One of the people who influenced the development of cognitive psychology more seriously is the German psychologist and physiologist Wilhelm Wundt, because he repeatedly said that consciousness has creative potential. Subsequently, this topic was partially developed in functionalism and structuralism, and only with the advent of behaviorism, which focused not on consciousness, but on behavior, at the beginning of the twentieth century, interest in it faded for almost half a century.
But already in the 1950s, a new stage in the development of cognitive science began. One of the pioneers of the movement was the American psychologist Edward Tolman. He pointed out the importance of considering cognitive variables and encouraged a shift away from the stimulus-response approach inherent in behaviorism. However, the most significant contribution to the formation of the approach was made by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who studied child psychology, focusing on the stages of cognitive development. And even despite the fact that Piaget’s work was devoted mostly to child psychology, the range of applicability of the cognitive approach expanded significantly, and Piaget himself received the award “For Outstanding Contribution to the Development of Science.”
In the 1970s, cognitive psychology began to increasingly emerge as a distinct field of research and therapeutic practice. Many of its provisions became the basis of psycholinguistics, and its conclusions began to be used in other branches of psychological science, such as educational psychology, personality psychology and social psychology.
Currently, cognitive psychology is largely based on analogies between the mechanisms of human cognition and the transformation of information in computing devices. (And this despite the fact that its foundations were laid before cybernetics and complex computing and information technology appeared.)
The most common concept is that the psyche is a device that has a fixed ability to transform received signals. The main significance in it is the internal cognitive schemes and activities of the body involved in the process of cognition. The human cognitive system is considered as a system with input, storage and output devices, taking into account its throughput potential. And the basic metaphor of cognitive psychology is a computer metaphor, according to which the work of the human brain is likened to the work of a computer processor.
For those who are interested in representatives of cognitive psychology, we will name them. These are Boris Velichkovsky, George Sperling, Robert Solso, Karl Pribram, Jerome Bruner, George Miller, Ulrik Neisser, Allen Newell, Simon Herbert and some others. At the end of the article we will also provide a small list of books by some of these authors. Now the main ideas of cognitive science are of greatest interest to us.
But given the seriousness of the topic and the physical impossibility of talking about everything in one article, it won’t hurt if you take the time to watch the hour and a half video. This is a recording of the lecture “What is cognitive psychology, where does it come from and where is it going” by Maria Falikman, Doctor of Psychology, Senior Researcher at the Center for Cognitive Research, Faculty of Philology, Moscow State University. However, you can watch it after finishing the article or at any suitable time.
Sections
Modern cognitive behavioral psychology includes the following sections :
- thinking, decision making;
- perception;
- development;
- pattern recognition;
- speech;
- attention;
- imagination;
- memory;
- intelligence (and this includes natural and, to some extent, artificial).
Read about what cognitive dissonance is here.
Cognitive dissonance: definition
The individual’s desire for inner harmony and the discomfort experienced at this moment is called “cognitive dissonance” in psychology. Every person experiences it at different periods of life.
It arises as a result of contradictions between knowledge about the situation and reality or the knowledge and actions of the individual. At the same time, the cognitive picture of the world is disrupted, and that same discomfort arises, pushing a person to a series of actions in order to re-enter a state of harmony with himself.
Basic principles and methods
The main position of cognitive psychology can be identified as a protest against the ideas of behaviorism , the statement that human behavior comes from the individual’s mental abilities.
The main concepts of this direction are the processes of cognitivism, which include imagination, memory, and thinking. They form certain conceptual schemes with the help of which behavior is built.
The main method of cognitive psychology is the replacement of a personal construct.
In other words, it is a comparative analysis of how different individuals perceive information coming from the external environment and subsequently interpret it. This method consists of the following steps:
- Introductory stage: the individual receives certain tools (for example, a diary), thanks to which it becomes possible to identify erroneous judgments and their causes.
- Empirical stage , when an individual, with the help of a psychotherapist, works through techniques for the correct correlation of various phenomena. That is, arguments for and against are formulated, the advantages and disadvantages of behavioral models are considered.
- Pragmatic stage , the result of which is the individual’s awareness of his own response actions.
There are other methods, the choice of which should be based on the type of mental disorder of the person's behavior. For example, methods of targeted repetition, decentering, role reversal, or emotion substitution.
What ideas does he explore and consider?
As noted earlier, various cognitive processes are the objects of study in cognitive psychology. She also considers the emotional sphere of personality, developmental psychology and pattern recognition.
The main idea is to study the cognitive processes of the human psyche by analogy with the functions of a computing device.
In other words, the computer performs various operations to receive, process, store and output information.
Adherents of cognitivism believe that the human mind works according to a similar concept and the cognitive functions of the psyche work according to a similar pattern.
Another idea is the gradual processing of information in the human psyche. That is, all stimuli coming from outside pass through a certain chain of transformations.
There is also the idea of the maximum volume of information processing systems. This leads to the main direction of activity of cognitive psychologists, which is to search for natural and most effective methods of working with information that enters the individual’s psyche.
Problems and discoveries
W. Neisser's work “Cognition and Reality,” published in 1976, identified the main problems in the development of the new discipline. The scientist suggested that this science cannot solve everyday problems of people, relying only on laboratory experimental methods. He also gave a positive assessment of the theory of direct perception developed by James and Eleanor Gibson, which can be successfully used in cognitive psychology.
American neurophysiologist Karl Pribram briefly touched on cognitive processes in his developments. His scientific contribution is related to the study of “brain languages” and the creation of a holographic model of mental functioning. During the last work, an experiment was carried out - resection of the brains of animals. After large areas were removed, memory and skills were preserved. This gave grounds to assert that the entire brain, and not its individual areas, is responsible for cognitive processes. The hologram itself worked based on the interference of two electromagnetic waves. When any part of it was separated, the entire image was preserved, although less clearly. Pribram's model has not yet been accepted by the scientific community, however, it is often discussed in transpersonal psychology.
Famous representatives
The emergence of this direction was facilitated by the activities of W. Neisser, who outlined its main provisions, and J. Miller, who is the founder of the Center for Cognitive Psychology.
Also among the most famous representatives of cognitive psychology are the following: J. Sperling, J. Bruner, R. Solso, S. Herbert, K. Pribram, A. Newell .
They made a significant contribution to the study of the laws of cognitive processes and cognition in general.
Criticism
In the early years of cognitive psychology, behaviorist critics believed that the empiricism it pursued was incompatible with the concept of internal mental states. Cognitive neuroscience, however, continues to accumulate evidence of direct correlations between physiological brain activity and putative mental states, supporting the foundations of cognitive psychology.
Some observers suggest that as cognitive psychology became a movement during the 1970s, the complexity of the phenomena and processes it studied meant that it also began to lose cohesion as a field of study.
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Models of attention
Problems of attention are often studied in the field of cognitive psychology.
It was representatives of this industry who developed the most interesting models of attention . The main ones include:
- selective attention patterns;
- attention as a perceptual action;
- attention as mental effort.
Selective
Selective attention models are associated with the names of D. Broadbent, K. Cherry.
The main idea of this theory is that the structure of information processing has a certain bottleneck or filter, a funnel.
The main subject of discussion of selective attention models is to identify the location of this filter (at what stage of information processing) and by what principles information is selected , that is, its selection.
Perceptual action
Attention as a perceptual action was considered by W. Neisser , who criticized the selective model.
He believed that attention is the focus of the main flow of information processing activity on a limited part of the available input. That is, he defined it as a process of active choice .
Mental effort
Attention as a mental effort is also called the capacitive model of D. Kahneman.
He noted the presence of limitations in an individual's ability to perform mental work.
By attention, D. Kahneman understood it as a kind of internal effort , the implementation of which requires resources. Thus, the act of attention depends to a greater extent not on the desires of the individual, but on the objective complexity of the task assigned to him.
This video is about metaphors and models of attention in cognitive psychology:
