COGNITIVE

APPROACH
prepared & presented by G8
 OVERVIEW

Main Focus and Purpose Concepts And

Example
Historical Overview, Key
Figures Or Proponents
Major Criticisms
Significant Events Or Limitations
Or Milestones
ENERGIZER
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ANSWER: PERCEPTION
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ANSWER: ATTENTION
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ANSWER: MEMORY
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The cognitive approach in psychology uses experimental research
to study internal mental processes like attention, perception,
memory, and decision-making. It resembles the human mind as a
computer, encoding, storing, and retrieving information. It explores

Aim &
how thoughts, feelings, creativity, and problem-solving interact to
shape thinking and understand how these processes influence
Purpose behavior.
 Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as
attention, memory, perception, language use, problem solving,
creativity, and thinking.

Some key questions that cognitive psychologists seek to address

include:

1
How do we perceive the world around us?
How do we learn and remember information?
How do we think and reason?
How do we communicate and understand language?
How do our emotions and motivations influence our thoughts
Aim & and behavior?
What are the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive
Purpose processes?

By addressing these questions, cognitive psychologists aim to

gain a better understanding of human cognition and its role in
various aspects of our lives, such as learning, education, health,
and well-being.
Cognitive psychology gained popularity in the 1950s to 1970s as
researchers became more interested in how thinking affects
behavior. This period is called the "cognitive revolution" and

2
represented a shift in thinking and focus for psychologists. Before
this time, the behaviorist approach dominated psychology. The
behaviorists only studied external behavior that could be
measured.

Behaviorists believed it was pointless to try to study the mind

because there was no way to see or objectively measure what
Historical
happened in someone's thoughts. The mind was seen as a black box
that couldn't be measured. In 1967, psychologist Ulric Neisser Overwiew
introduced the term, defining it as the study of information
perception, transformation, storage, and recovery.
 KEY FIGURES OR PROPONENTS

Wiener’s book “Cybernetics” introduced concepts such as input and output, which influenced the
1948 development of information processing models in cognitive psychology.

Miller’s paper “The Magical Number 7 Plus or Minus 2” proposed that short-term memory has a limited
1956 capacity of around seven chunks of information, which became a foundational concept in cognitive
psychology.

Neisser’s book “Cognitive Psychology” formally established cognitive psychology as a separate area
1967 of study, focusing on mental processes such as perception, memory, and thinking.

Newell and Simon developed the General Problem Solver, a computer program that simulated human
1972 problem-solving, contributing to the growth of artificial intelligence and cognitive modeling.

Proposal of the Working Memory Model, which expanded on the concept of short-term memory and
1974 introduced the idea of a central executive.
KEY FIGURES OR PROPONENTS

ULRIC NEISSER (1928-2012)

“Father of cognitive psychology” and an advocate for ecological
approaches to cognitive research.
With the publication of Cognitive Psychology (1967), Neisser
brought together research concerning perception, pattern
recognition, attention, problem solving, and remembering.
His most famous research involves flashbulb memories and
inattentional blindness.
Formally coined the term cognitive psychology and defining it as
“all processes by which the sensory input is transformed,
reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used”
KEY FIGURES OR PROPONENTS

JEAN PIAGET (1896-1980)

Piaget proposed a stage theory of cognitive development,
suggesting that children actively construct their
understanding of the world through a series of stages. Key
stages: Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational,
and formal operational.
Piaget believed that children organize their experiences into
mental structures called schemas.
KEY FIGURES OR PROPONENTS

CARL WERNICKE (1848-1905)

A German psychiatrist and neurologist. He is best known to
speech-language pathologists for his study of aphasia and for
his discovery of the area in the cerebrum responsible for
receptive language/speech phenomena in the superior gyrus of
the temporal lobe (Wernicke aphasia).
Proposed a model for the mental processing of language:
Wernicke's area, a critical brain region associated with language
comprehension. Situated in the left hemisphere's posterior
superior temporal gyrus, this area is essential for processing
auditory and visual language inputs.
Wernicke's aphasia is another name for receptive aphasia. It
happens when the area of your brain that controls language
called the Wernicke area is damaged.
KEY FIGURES OR PROPONENTS

NOAM CHOMSKY (1928)

Chomsky believed that rules for language acquisition are innate
(inborn) and strengthen naturally as humans grow and develop.
Children are preprogrammed with a special ability to learn a
language early in life. He called this intrinsic cognitive ability
the learning acquisition device (LAD).
Chomsky's theory of language acquisition argues that human
brain structures naturally allow for the capacity to learn and
use languages.
KEY FIGURES OR PROPONENTS

LEV VYGOTSKY (1896-1934)

Vygotsky’s Cognitive Development Theory argues that cognitive
abilities are socially guided and constructed:

Zone of proximal development - the gap between what a child

can do independently and what they can do with the help of
others.
Scaffolding - The process of providing support to a child as
they learn a new skill.
KEY FIGURES OR PROPONENTS

AARON BECK (1921-2021)

He developed an approach to therapy based on cognitive
psychology called cognitive therapy. Later it was combined
with behavioral approaches to form cognitive-behavioral
therapy (CBT).
Beck took the ideas and findings of cognitive psychology and
used them to help treat mental disorders.
 The cognitive approach to psychology has evolved significantly over time,
influenced by various groundbreaking studies and theories. Here are some key
events:

Early Foundations:

Wilhelm Wundt's introspection experiments: While not strictly cognitive,

Wundt's work on introspection laid the groundwork for studying mental

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processes.
William James's Principles of Psychology: James's book, published in 1890,
emphasized the importance of consciousness and mental processes in
understanding behavior.

The Rise of Cognitive Psychology:

Gestalt psychology: This movement, led by psychologists like Max

Significant Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka, focused on the whole

Events
perception rather than individual elements, influencing cognitive theories
of perception and problem-solving.
Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development: Piaget's work on children's
cognitive development, emphasizing stages and schemas, revolutionized
our understanding of how children think and learn.
Noam Chomsky's theories of language: Chomsky's ideas about language
acquisition and universal grammar challenged behaviorist explanations
and emphasized the innate nature of language.
 Cognitive Revolution:

Computer metaphor: The comparison of the mind to a computer, with

information processing as a central metaphor, became a dominant
framework in cognitive psychology.
Ulric Neisser's Cognitive Psychology: Neisser's influential textbook in 1967

3
solidified cognitive psychology as a distinct field and defined its key
concepts.
Development of cognitive neuroscience: Advances in brain imaging
techniques (e.g., fMRI, PET) allowed researchers to study the neural
correlates of cognitive processes.

Contemporary Developments:

Significant Embodied cognition: This approach emphasizes the role of the body and the

Events
environment in cognition, challenging the traditional view of the mind as a
separate entity.
Computational modeling: Cognitive psychologists use computer simulations
to model and test theories about cognitive processes.
Social cognition: This subfield examines how people perceive, understand,
and interact with others, incorporating social and cultural factors into
cognitive processes.
 CONCEPTS & EXAMPLES
Key Concept Definition
A state of focused awareness on a subset of the available perceptual information. The ability to focus on
specific stimuli while ignoring others.
ATTENTION
Divided attention - a person’s ability to focus on two or more things at one time.

It is how people come to understand the world around them through interpretation of stimuli. The process of
PERCEPTION
interpreting sensory information.

The encoding, storage, and retrieval of information.

THREE MAIN SUBCLASSES:

MEMORY 1. Procedural memory - the process of retrieving information necessary to perform learned skills.
2. Semantic memory - a long-term memory category involving the recollection of ideas, concepts, and facts
commonly regarded as general knowledge.
3. Episodic memory - a form of long-term memory that captures the details of past events that one has
personally experienced.

A cognitive processing directed at achieving a goal when the problem solver does not initially know a solution
method.

PROBLEM-SOLVING
Metacognition - the capacity to reflect on, evaluate, and control cognitive processes such as decision-
making, memory, and perception. It involves the ability to assess one's own performance and is crucial for
adaptive behavior in various contexts.

LANGUAGE The ability to communicate through symbols and rules.

 MAJOR CRITISMS & LIMITATIONS

Complexity of mental experiences - Mental

Behaviorist Critique - B.F. Skinner criticizes the processes are often influenced by individual
cognitive approach. He believes that only differences, such as personality, culture, and past
external stimulus-response behavior should be experiences, which can introduce variability and
studied, as this can be scientifically measured. confounds in research.

Reductionist - The cognitive approach is Computer Analogy - Computers do not have

reductionist as it does not consider emotions and feelings, emotions, or a sense of self, which play
motivation, which influence the processing of crucial roles in human cognition and behavior.
information and memory. For example, according The brain-computer metaphor is often used
to the Yerkes-Dodson law, anxiety can influence implicitly in neuroscience literature through
our memory. terms like “sensory computation,” “algorithms,”
and “neural codes.” However, it is difficult to
identify these concepts in the actual brain.
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