What is Cognitive Psychology?
What is Cognitive Psychology? Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mind and how it works. It is concerned with the processes of perception, attention, memory, language, thinking, and problem solving. Cognitive psychologists study how these processes work together to allow us to learn, remember, understand, and make decisions. History of Cognitive Psychology Cognitive psychology emerged as a distinct field of psychology in the 1960s. Prior to this time, the dominant approach to psychology was behaviorism, which focused on studying observable behavior and ignoring mental processes. However, a number of psychologists began to argue that behaviorism could not fully explain human behavior, and that it was necessary to study mental processes in order to understand how people think and learn. One of the key figures in the development of cognitive psychology was Ulric Neisser. In his 1967 book, Cognitive Psychology, Neisser defined cognitive psychology as "the study of the