Developments in Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the acquisition, processing, and storing of information. As part of the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics. Because cognitive psychology touches on many other disciplines, people in a number of different fields often study this branch of psychology.

Cognitive theory contends that solutions to problems take the form of algorithms—rules that are not necessarily understood but promise a solution, or heuristics—rules that are understood but that do not always guarantee solutions. In other instances, solutions may be found through insight, a sudden awareness of relationships.

Cognitive psychology is radically different from previous psychological approaches in two key ways.

1) It accepts the use of the scientific method, and generally rejects introspection as a valid method of investigation, unlike phenomenological methods such as Freudian psychology.
2) It explicitly acknowledges the existence of internal mental states (such as belief, desire and motivation) unlike behaviorist psychology.

In recent years, cognitive psychology has become associated with information processing, which examines artificial intelligence in computers to find out whether they are capable of problem solving in ways similar to humans.  In fact, it developed as one of the significant aspects of the inter-disciplinary subject of cognitive science, which attempts to integrate a range of approaches in research on the mind and mental processes.

The author of this article runs a website about jerryfodor.com, Cognition and Cognitive Science.