COGNITIVE APPROACH

The term cognitive psychology came into use with the publication of the book Cognitive Psychology. Cognitive Psychology revolves around the notion that if we want to know what makes people tick then the way to do it is to figure out what processes are actually going on in their minds. 

Cognition literally means “knowing”. In other words, psychologists from this approach study cognition which is ‘the mental act or process by which knowledge is acquired.  They focus on the way humans process information, looking at how we treat information that comes in to the person what behaviourists would call stimuli and how this treatment leads to responses. In other words, they are interested in the variables that mediate between stimulus/input and response/output. Cognitive psychology assumes our behaviour is an internal process including perception, attention, language, memory and thought The cognitive approach applies a nomothetic approach to discover human cognitive processes, but have also adopted idiographic techniques through using case studies

Cognitive psychology became of great importance in the mid-1950s. Several factors were important in this: -

o Dissatisfaction with the behaviourist approach in its simple emphasis on external behaviour rather than internal processes

o The development of better experimental methods

o The start of the use of computers allowed psychologists to try to understand the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with something simpler and better understood i.e. an artificial system such as a computer.