Cognitive psychology is a scientific branch of psychology that studies how sensory input is transformed into beliefs and actions through cognition. It rejects anecdotal introspective evidence and focuses on researching the specifics of the human brain. It is part of the interdisciplinary superfield of cognitive science.
Cognitive psychology is a point of view in psychology with its specific journals, researchers and research programs. Contrast with other domains of psychology: biological psychology, clinical psychology, educational psychology, developmental psychology, experimental psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, and linguistics. Contrast with other theoretical perspectives in psychology: behaviorism, dynamic psychology, introspectivism, Freudian psychology and pop psychology.
The field of cognitive psychology is an expansive one, but it generally begins by looking at how sensory input is transformed into beliefs and actions through the process of cognition. It has a reputation for being slightly more scientific than other areas of psychology, placing great emphasis on experimentation and testing and the scientific method in general. Cognitive psychology, in contrast to pop psychology, explicitly rejects anecdotal introspective evidence as a valid foundation for psychological theories.
The term “cognitive psychology” was coined by Ulric Neisser in 1967, in a book of the same name. It was a name given to an emerging point of view that jumpstarted the computer metaphor to describe the human mind, without relying on it to the point of reducing the human mind to a computer. Like the rest of materialist science, cognitive psychology recognizes that the mind is defined as what the brain does, and the brain is a purely physical system operating (albeit in a complex way) within the bounds of natural law and the forces of causation. and effect. This view is called causal functionalism or simply functionalism.
Cognitive psychology focuses on researching the “specifics” of the human brain. It tracks how many items we can hold in memory at once, how different streams of sensory data are mixed to produce higher level inferences, our strengths and weaknesses in judging probabilities in everyday situations, how knowledge is represented in the mind and in the human brain, the formation of conceptual categories and many other fascinating research areas. Cognitive psychology is an important part of the interdisciplinary superfield of cognitive science, which also includes neuroscience, artificial intelligence, computer science, biology, and other scientific disciplines.
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