Video:Overview of Cognitive Psychology

Transcript:Overview of Cognitive Psychology

I'm Dr. Richard Catrambone and I want to talk to you about an overview of cognitive psychology.

What Is Cognitive Psychology?

Cognitive psychologists tend to want to study issue that deal with things like attention, memory, problem solving, categorization, sensation and perception, judgment and decision making, how all those processes work are all key parts of cognitive psychology. 

Core Focus of Cognitive Psychology

The core focus is again the study of mental events that presumably we all have a brain inside our skulls, but we can’t always study every detail of the brain very effectively. Although as more and more neurological techniques become available, that becomes less true and so we often talk about processes and events and structures in the mind this metaphorical thing. That is, not the brain but that the brain can presumably account for some things like memory and spreading activation. Those are some core concepts you might find in cognitive psychology research. Cognitive psychology is in some sense a response to behaviorism. 

Roots of Cognitive Psychology

In the early days of psychology there were a variety of methods people used to study human thought and human emotion there was a time when it was believed that very strictly you’d want to talk about environmental factors and people’s responses to them, their behaviors.

And over time there was a development where researchers believed that you could study the inner workings of somebody’s mind even if it didn’t always involve overt behaviors. 

It’s hard to pin a date as to when cognitive psychology as a separate discipline developed. I think that the first book, the first text book, that was called “cognitive psychology” came out in the mid 60s, but I think you could argue that there were people doing cognitive related research 20, 30, 40 years even before that.

So that was a brief overview of cognitive psychology. For more information, visit About.com.