Cognitive Psychology Definition Paper

Human psychology has always been rather sophisticated and many-sided subject for research. Cognition, as one of the vitally important psychological phenomena, is thoroughly studied nowadays. In this paper we are going to study briefly the notion of cognition, the cognitive psychology branch, its history and researches, along with relation to behaviorism.
Cognition is generally agreed to include all the processes, “by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations” (Anderson, 1996). Judging from this definition quite a lot of processes might be included into this term, this means, that almost any psychological phenomenon might be considered cognitive. The term “cognition” comes from Greek language, where “cognoscere” means “to know”. This term is directly related to the main subject studied by cognitive psychology – namely the process of getting and applying of the new information and knowledge. No wonder, that this branch of psychology is really important for children psychology researches, for philosophy, linguistics and so on. However, the conclusion, that cognitive psychology would study all human activities is certainly ungrounded. It studies these activities only from certain point of view. In order to be clear, we are to mention the two major differences of cognitive psychology from other branches of it. First of all cognitive psychology is said to apply only scientific method, instead of introspection, in contrast to Freud’s approach for example. The second difference is actual for behaviorist approach – because cognitive psychology acknowledges existence of internal mental states (including desire, belief, motivation and so on) (Barsalou, 2003). Some critics state, that one of the main conflicts of cognitive psychology lies exactly in its combining of empiricism and acceptance of internal mental states, as mentioned above. Thus, cognitive psychology investigates the internal mental processes and visual processing, including, memory, thinking, feeling, language acquisition and so on.
Some researchers state, that the roots of cognitive psychology go till the works of Aristotle, namely his “De Memoria”. The end of the 1800s is marked with development of cognitive approaches to solving of psychological problems. The main subject of investigation for cognitive psychology is the mental processing of the accepted information. The works of Wilhelm Wundt, Gestalt psychology of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka are said to be the foundations of cognitive psychology approach (Schunk, 2004). Jean Piaget developed the theory of cognitive development of children, which was widely used for general children psychology.
When behaviorism started to actively develop at the beginning of the twentieth century, the decline of cognitive psychology was noted. Briefly, Behaviorism is defined as “the study of laws relating observable behavior to objective, observable stimulus conditions without any recourse to internal mental processes” (Anderson, 1996). Observation of behavior was vitally important for cognitive psychology, because it contributed to making conclusions about human reactions to various stimuli, to different stimulated or experimental situations. These reactions were to serve the building of the connection between the reaction of people and their internal brain processes, for example learners of language are set into concrete language environment and the way they react to this environment and concrete learning situation, the way, they behave in this situation and the final results of this learning method are studied.