THE COGNITIVE APPROACH
The study of human mental processes and
their role in thinking, feeling and behaving.
HISTORY AND CONTEXT
• In the 1930’s psychologists realised that they needed to look inside the ‘black box’ between stimulus and response as seen in the behaviourist
approach. The cognitive approach focuses on inner mental processes and what makes a person ‘tick’ instead of the response to an external
stimulus. Overall, it is the study of ‘mental acts or processes by which knowledge is acquired’.
• They are interested in how we treat incoming information and how this leads to a response (the variable between stimulus and response)
• People are viewed with similarity to computers, both human brains and computers process information, store data and have an input/output
procedure. Memory, attention, language, thinking and perception are central processes of interest to cognitive psychologists.
• It is a scientific approach that mostly uses laboratory experiments. This leads to its biggest criticism; the lack of ecological validity.
• Miller’s proposition of the capacity of the short term memory (7+ or –2) is often viewed as the birth of cognitive psychology.
• Atkinson and Shiffrin’s multi store model of memory is also viewed with importance in the timeline of cognitive psychologies history.
• It is a reductionist approach, meaning that any behaviour no matter how complex can be reduced to a simple cognitive process (memory,
perception)
• In the 1950’s cognitive psychology became of greater importance as dissatisfaction with the behaviourist approach grew. The development of
better experimental methods and the comparison of human and computer processing of information were also factors in its increasing
significance.
THE STUDY OF INTERNAL MENTAL
PROCESSES AND THE USE OF COMPUTER
MODELS TO INFER ‘WHAT GOES ON IN THE
HEAD’
• Cognitive psychology sees the individual as a processor of information , in much the
same way that a computer takes in information and follows a program to produce
information to produce an output.
• The development of the computer in the 1950s had an important influence on
psychology. The computer gave cognitive psychologist a metaphor, or analogy, to which
they could compare human mental processing. The use of a computer as a tool for
thinking how the human mind handles information is known as the computer analogy.
Input
Program
Output
SCHEMAS
• A schema is referred to as a package of knowledge of thoughts or behaviour
that organizes categories of information and the relationships to them.
• A schema is also seen as a ‘stereotype’ of a certain category.
• For example, seeing a desk in an office would be normal to an office schema,
whereas seeing a cooker wouldn’t.
• The idea of a schema was first taken up by psychologist Frederick Bartlett.
Bartlett argued that existing knowledge in the form of schemas plays an
important role in memorising information.
• Bartlett (1932) carried out an influential piece of research in which he asked
participants to listen to and then recall a Native American folk tale called ‘War
of the Ghosts’. Bartlett found that participants left out elements of the story
that were culturally unfamiliar to them (e.g. references to ghosts and spirits).
They added material to the story to make it more coherent in line with their
schema, and changed some elements (e.g. canoes became boats). Bartlett
showed how people use their schemas and existing knowledge to make sense
of new incoming information – a process he referred to as ’effort after
meaning’.
THE EMERGENCE OF COGNITIVE
NEUROSCIENCE
• Cognitive neuroscience brings together brain scanning techniques in order to
study and understand cognitive processes such as memory and attention.
• cognitive neuroscientists typically study patients that have suffered some sort
of damage to their brains wither through trauma, disease or stroke. These
patients are thought to be neurotypical.
• Positrons emitting tomography's (PET) and functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) are two types of technology that neuroscientists test the brain.
• The patients usually undergo tests whilst the scanning of the brain is taking
place so that the brain can be seen 'in action'.
• Comparisons of how the brain looks and works can then be compared to the
functions and imaging of a regular brain to see where the inconsistencies and
differenced occur
DOUBLE DISSOCIATION: AN EXAMPLE OF
THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENTIFIC
APPROACH
• Two patients sow a mirror image of impairment. For example person 1 can do
task A but not B and person 2 can do B but not A.
• This was demonstrated in a patient known as ‘KF ( Warrington and Shallice
1969). ‘KF’ had a very poor STM but a fully functioning LTM. KF sustained
damage to the left partial occipital lobe of his brain during a motorcycle
accident.
• The opposite case of ‘HM’ was reported by Scoville and Milner 1957. ‘HM’ had
undergone surgery for epilepsy, in which his hippocampus was removed. ‘HM’
was unable to put any information in his LTM after the surgery, however his
STM was normal.
• These two cases represent evidence for double dissociation. It also shows that
LTM and STM are located in different areas of the brain.
• However, damage to the brain is rarely neat and the brain shows a remarkable
ability for plasticity, when new brain areas take over or compensate for the
damage to the original structure. This is most evident in children.
CONTRIBUTION OF THE COGNITIVE
APPROACH
• The cognitive approach has made a broad contribution to
areas such as the cognitive interview, cognitive behavioural
therapies (the most commonly prescribed form of therapy
in the UK today), memory, learning and information
processing styles, forgetting, selective attention, child
development, language acquisition, abnormal behaviour,
moral development and the eye witness testimony.
• The cognitive approach is highly influential across all areas
of psychology (biological, social, behaviourism, development
etc.)