Custom research paper on Cognitive Psychology Definition Paper

However, behaviorism was not able to completely force out the cognitive psychology, as it lacked connection between internal mental processes and performance and so on. Behaviorism lost the position of the leading branch of the psychology and around the year 1950 “Cognitive Revolution” started. In the next decade cognitive psychology continued to hold the positions. Finally, starting from the 1970s, more than sixty universities all over the world established the programs of cognitive psychology (Schunk, 2004).
The approaches to investigation, used by cognitive psychologists, are mainly experimental and psychophysical in order to make conclusions about mental process and response of people to various stimuli. Cognitive psychologists suggested, that the process of problems solving represents an algorithm, according to which rules are worked out, either those, which guarantee solutions to the problems, but are not understood, or vice verse – understood, but never guarantee the solution.
“Cognitive psychology is based on two assumptions: (1) Human cognition can at least in principle be fully revealed by the scientific method, that is, individual components of mental processes can be identified and understood, and (2) Internal mental processes can be described in terms of rules or algorithms in information processing models. There has been much recent debate on these assumptions” (Anderson, 1996).custom research paper
The major methods of investigation, applied by the cognitive psychology specialist, are experimentation and simulation. Very often certain predictions are made before the experiment, and then the situation is simulated, the results of the experiment are afterwards compared to the predictions. Lately computers were involved into the process of investigation, thus cognitive psychology became rather important for neuroscience.
Overall, in this paper we have studied the notion of cognitive psychology, its definition, its historical development, methods of investigation and relation to behaviorism.

References:

Anderson, J.R. (1996) The architecture of Cognition. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Barsalou, L.W. (2003) Abstraction in perceptual symbol systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences

Schunk, D. H. (2004). Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective, 5th. Pearson, Merrill Prentice Hall