COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Our species is called Homo sapiens, or “human, the wise,” reflecting - PowerPoint Presentation

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COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Our species is called Homo sapiens, or “human, the wise,” reflecting the general belief

that our

superior thought processes are what distinguish us from other animals. The brain is the organ of the human mind, but the connection between the brain and the mind was not always known. The Greek philosopher Aristotle localized the mind in the heart. He thought the function of the brain was to cool the blood. Cognitive psychology is the science of how the mind is organized to produce intelligent thought and how the mind is realized in the brain.Cognitive psychology has been defined as the psychology of mental processes

cognitive psychology—

the branch

of psychology concerned with how people acquire, store, transform, use, and communicate informationcognitive psychology deals with our mental life: what goes on inside our heads when we perceive, attend, remember, think, categorize, reason, decide, and so forth.The cognitive processes depicted include attention, mentally focusing on some stimulus (the mysterious shape); perception, interpreting sensory information to yield meaningful

information;

and pattern recognition, classifying a stimulus into a known category. In recognizing the shape as something familiar, you no doubt called on memory, the storage facilities and retrieval processes of cognition. All this processing occurred rapidly, probably within a few seconds or less.

Cognitive psychology can also

been described as the study of understanding and knowing.

A more precise definition of cognitive psychology is that it is the study of the way in which the brain processes information. It concerns the way we take in information from the outside world, how we make sense of that information and what use we make of it. Cognition is thus a rather broad umbrella term, which includes many component processes, and this possibly explains why psychologists have found it so difficult to come up with a simple and unified definition of cognitive psychology.

0BJECTIVESCognitive psychology

History

DevelopmentVarious theoretical perspectiveAttentionPerceptionLearning