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For your AS Psychology course, you will study 4 Cogonitive Studies in detail.  These are:

Assumptions of the Cognitive Approach

  • Cognitive psychologists aim to explain how our mental processes operate and how our behavior relates to these.

  • They examine how we take information from the world around us and how we process that information in order to make a response (e.g. an action or an emotion).

  • As we cannot directly observe the processes going on in our minds, researchers need a way to work out what is going on. To do so, they propose theories  of how these processes work and, based on these, make predictions about what will happen

  • Research in this area studies the mental processes by which we:

  • Receive information through our senses and make sense of this information (perception).

  • How we store and retrieve information (memory)

  • How we manipulate that information (thinking).

 

Cognitive psychology mainly uses the research methods of experiments and case studies of brain-damaged individuals.

 

Cognitive psychology is characterized by the information processing approach (your brain is like a computer).

Cognitive Test Mark Scheme

Cognitive Psychology

The Cognitive Revolution

The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology was a departure from the Behaviourist tenet that it was impossible to understand processes taking place inside the brain or mind, instead it was only possible to look at the outcomes or behaviours created by specific circumstances.  

Cognitive Psychologists asserted that, through carefully designed experiments, it was possible to create conditions which revealed information about internal processes, such as memory, language, perception and thinking.

Cognitive psychology replaced behaviourism as the main approach in the 1950’s. The ‘cognitive revolution’ is considered to have started in 1956 when a conference was held which featured some of the most significant people in cognitive psychology, such as George Miller and Noam Chomsky. By the 1970’s the Cognitive approach had become the dominant approach in psychology.

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