Cognitive Psychology Quiz

Cognitive Psychology: A Summary

• Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem-solving, creativity, and reasoning.

• Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science.

• The domain of cognitive psychology overlaps with that of cognitive science, which takes a more interdisciplinary approach and includes studies of non-human subjects and artificial intelligence.

• The mid to late 19th century was a critical time in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline, with discoveries like Paul Broca's and Carl Wernicke's work on language.

• Cognitive psychologists study the mental processes that affect behavior, including attention, memory, perception, language, and metacognition.

• Attention can be divided into two major attentional systems: exogenous control and endogenous control.

• Short-term memory is more clearly defined as working memory, which is the ability to process and maintain temporary information in a wide range of everyday activities in the face of distraction.

• Long-term memory is broken down into three main sub-classes: episodic memory, semantic memory, and procedural memory.

• Perception involves both the physical senses and the cognitive processes involved in interpreting those senses.

• Social cognition is a specific sub-set of social psychology that concentrates on processes that have been of particular focus within cognitive psychology, specifically applied to human interactions.

• The Theory of Mind (ToM) deals specifically with the ability of an individual to effectively understand and attribute cognition to those around them.

• Cognitive psychology is better understood as predominantly concerned with applied psychology, while cognitive science is better understood as predominantly concerned with a much broader scope, with links to philosophy, linguistics, anthropology.Overview of Cognitive Psychology

• Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as "attention, language use, perception, problem solving, memory, and thinking."

• Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that emerged in the mid-20th century, and its precursors can be traced back to the 1800s.

• Cognitive psychology is concerned with how people acquire, process, and store information.

• The primary goal of cognitive psychology is to explain how people think, reason, and remember.

• Cognitive psychology is closely related to neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

• Cognitive psychology often involves non-human subjects to avoid ethical scrutiny if performed on human participants.

• Some observers have suggested that cognitive psychology has lost cohesion as a field of study due to the intricacies of the phenomena and processes it examines.

• There is disagreement between neuropsychologists and cognitive psychologists, and cognitive psychology has produced models of cognition which are not supported by modern brain science.

• In the field of language cognition research, there is a divide between generative grammar and cognitive linguistics.

• Major research areas in cognitive psychology include attention, perception, memory, language, problem-solving, and decision-making.

• Influential cognitive psychologists include George Miller, Jean Piaget, Ulric Neisser, and Noam Chomsky.

• Cognitive psychology has contributed to the development of cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on changing thought patterns to improve mental health.