Cognitive Psychology

 

In the middle of the 20th century alongside the massive proliferation of computers and new specialism in psychology emerged some thought it was so influential that they call it a revolution the cognitive revolution. So, what is cognitive psychology? what answer that question it's worth thinking for just a moment about what psychology looked like just before cognitive psychology existed the subject was engulfed in a movement called behaviorism. With the prevailing belief that the role of psychology was to study people's behaviors, but some psychologists were becoming increasingly frustrated that by only studying behaviors they weren't able to understand the processes that were going on internally and so in a grand shift cognitive psychology emerged as the study of mental processes and complex behaviors. Notice that cognitive psychology wasn't saying that behaviors aren't important they wanted to tie the external behaviors with the internal mental processes that facilitated them processes such as learning, memory, language development and mental problem-solving.

The most prevalent metaphor within cognitive psychology is that the human mind is a computer, the approaches really tracked developments in computer science. Early cognitive psychology concepts were very simple like early computing machines a and b go in C comes out as computers they're developed so then did the scope of the metaphor to the point that nowadays with cloud network computing becoming the norm cognitive psychology too has developed the computer metaphor and now, we use the analogy of neural networks cognition itself means knowing. So, cognitive processes actually refer to all ways in which knowledge is acquired stored and used because of this we see a large number of later psychological specialisms which we could say our cognitive in flavor for example a lot of social psychology looks at the hidden cognitive processes at work as a result of interpersonal and environmental interactions and certainly large swathes of developmental psychology is looking at the development of cognitive processes just think of stages of development as psychology is developed and new specialisms emerge we now see a more complementary relationship between approaches which could be indicative of the subject maturing approaches are looking to supersede a weaker precedent like functionalism dismissing structuralism but instead specialisms now overlap an area of overlap that's really built momentum over the last decade or so is cognitive neuroscience.

Now traditionally psychologists didn't really get involved in the brain on a physiological level they were interested in process not biology and structure however developments in the sophisticated brain imaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imager II and positron emission tomography now allow scientists to actually watch the brain in action whilst a person is performing a psychological task suddenly a whole new world of research opportunities opened up psychologists were able to watch learning as it happened to see memories being coded and recalled through activation of neural networks as if the brain were a great organic television and so with new technology came. These new opportunities and a new discipline of cognitive neuroscience emerged. Traditionally cognitive psychology could only make inferences about mental processes based on behavior focused experimentation with the continued development of research methods. Our understanding of the human mind increases to perhaps the most important message to take away from this story of cognitive psychologists’ development is that research outcomes are likely to be enhanced when different specialisms linked together rather than apart.

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