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Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes. The American Psychological Association defines cognitive psychology as "The study of higher mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, and thinking."Much of the work derived from cognitive psychology has been integrated into various other modern disciplines of psychological study including social psychology, personality psychology, abnormal psychology, developmental psychology, and educational psychology.

History

Philosophically, ruminations of the human mind and its processes have been around since the times of the ancient Greeks. In 387 BC, Plato is known to have suggested that the brain was the seat of the mental processes. In 1637, Rene Descartes posited that humans are born with innate ideas, and forwarded the idea of mind-body dualism, which would come to be known as substance dualism (essentially the idea that the mind and the body are two separate substances).From that time, major debates ensued through the 19th century regarding whether human thought was solely experiential (empiricism), or included innate knowledge (nativism). Some of those involved in this debate included George Berkeley and John Locke on the side of empiricism, and Immanuel Kant on the side of nativism.

With the philosophical debate continuing, the mid to late 18th century was a critical time in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline. Two discoveries that would later play substantial roles in cognitive psychology were Paul Broca's discovery of the area of the brain largely responsible for language production, and Carl Wernicke's discovery of an area thought to be mostly responsible for comprehension of language. Both areas were subsequently formally named for their founders and disruptions of an individual's language production or comprehension due to trauma or malformation in these areas have come to commonly be known as Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia.

In the mid 20th centruy, three main influences arose that would inspire and shape cognitive psychology as a formal school of thought:

• With the development of new warfare technology during WWII, the need for a greater understanding of human performance came to prominence. Problems such as how to best train soldiers to use new technology and how to deal with matters of attention while under duress became areas of need for military personnel. Behaviorism provided little if any insight into these matters and it was the work of Donald Broadbent, integrating concepts from human performance research and the recently developed information theory, that forged the way in this area.
• Developments in computer science would lead to parallels being drawn between human thought and the computational functionality of computers, opening entirely new areas of psychological thought. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon spent years developing the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and later worked with cognitive psychologists regarding the implications of AI. The effective result was more of a framework conceptualization of mental functions with their counterparts in computers (memory, storage, retrieval, etc.)
• Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique of behaviorism, and empiricism more generally, initiated what would come to be known as the "cognitive revolution".

Ulric Neisser is credited with formally having coined the term "cognitive psychology" (in terms of the current understanding of cognitive psychology) in his book Cognitive Psychology, published in 1967. Neisser's definition of "cognition" illustrates the, then, progressive concept of cognitive processes well:

The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts.

Because of the use of computational metaphors and terminology, cognitive psychology was able to benefit greatly from the flourishing of research in artificial intelligence and other related areas in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, it developed as one of the significant aspects of the inter-disciplinary subject of cognitive science, which attempts to integrate a range of approaches in research on the mind and mental processes.

Modern cognitive psychology

Modern perspectives on cognitive psychology generally address cognition in terms of the Two-Systems Metaphor, introduced by Jonathan Haidt in 2006, and expounded upon by Daniel Kahneman in 2011. The basic concept is that there are two separate systems at work in the mind, Type 1 (the elephant), and Type 2 (the rider). Type 1 thoughts are subconscious, fast, automatic, and require little effort. Type 2 thoughts are conscious, slow, effortful, and deliberate. All animals possess Type 1 thought, but only humans are thought to utilize Type 2 thought.

Applications of cognitive psychology

Abnormal psychology

Following the cognitive revolution, and and as a result of many of the principle discoveries to come out of the the field of cognitive psychology, the discipline of cognitive therapy evolved. Aaron T. Beck is generally regarded as the father of cognitive therapy. His work in the areas of recognition and treatment of depression has gained worldwide notoriety. In his 1987 book titled Cognitive Therapy of Depression, Beck puts forth three salient points with regard to his reasoning for the treatment of depression by means of therapy or therapy and antidepressants versus using a pharmacological-only approach:

1. Despite the prevalent use of antidepressants, the facts remain that not all patients respond to them. Beck cites (in 1987) that only 60 to 65% of patients respond to antidepressants, and recent meta-analyses (a statistical breakdown of multiple studies) show very similar numbers.
2.Many of those who do respond to antidepressants end up not taking their medications, for various reasons. They may develop side-effects or have some form of personal objection to taking the drugs.
3. Beck posits that the use of psychotropic drugs may lead to an eventual breakdown in the individual's coping mechanisms. His theory is that the person essentially becomes reliant on the medication as a means of improving mood and fails to practice those coping techniques typically practiced by healthy individuals to alleviate the effects of depressive symptoms. By failing to do so, if/when the patient is weened off of the antidepressants, they often are unable to cope with normal levels of depressed mood and feel driven to reinstate use of the antidepressants.

Social psychology

Many facets of modern social psychology have roots in research done within the field of cognitive psychology. Social Cognition is a specific sub-set of social psychology that concentrates on processes that have been of particular focus within cognitive psychology, specifically applied to human interactions. Gordon B. Moskowitz defines Social Cognition as "...the study of the mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of the people in our social world".

The development of multiple Social-Information Processing models (SIP) has been influential in studies involving aggressive and anti-social behavior. Kenneth Dodge's SIP model is one of, if not the most, empirically supported models relating to aggression. Among his research, Dodge posits that children who possess a greater ability to process social information more often display higher levels of socially acceptable behavior. His model asserts that there are five steps that an individual proceeds through when evaluating interactions with other individuals and that how the person interprets cues is key to their reactionary process.

Developmental psychology

Many of the prominent names in the field of developmental psychology base their understanding of development on cognitive models. One of the major paradigms of developmental psychology, the Theory of Mind (ToM), deals specifically with the ability of an individual to effectively understand and attribute cognition to those around them. This concept typically becomes fully apparent in children between the ages of 4 and 6. Essentially, before the child develops ToM, they are unable to understand that those around them can have different thoughts, ideas, or feelings than themselves. The development of ToM is a matter of metacognition, or thinking about one's thoughts. The child must be able to recognize that they have their own thoughts and in turn, that others possess thoughts of their own.
One of the foremost minds with regard to developmental psychology, Jean Piaget, focused much of his attention on cognitive development from birth through adulthood. Though there have been considerable challenges to parts of his Stages of Cognitive Development, they remain a staple in the realm of education. Piaget's concepts and ideas predated the cognitive revolution but inspired a wealth of research in the field of cognitive psychology and many of his principles have been blended with modern theory to synthesize the predominant views of today.

Educational psychology

Modern theories of education have applied many concepts that are focal points of cognitive psychology. Some of the most prominent concepts include:

• Metacognition: Metacognition is a broad concept encompassing all manners of one's thoughts and knowledge about their own thinking. A key area of educational focus in this realm is related to self-monitoring, which relates highly to how well students are able to evaluate their personal knowledge and apply strategies to improve knowledge in areas in which they are lacking.
• Declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge: Declarative knowledge is a persons 'encyclopedic' knowledge base, whereas procedural knowledge is specific knowledge relating to performing particular tasks. The application of these cognitive paradigms to education attempts to augment a student's ability to integrate declarative knowledge into newly learned procedures in an effort to facilitate accelerated learning.
• Knowledge organization: Applications of cognitive psychology's understanding of how knowledge is organized in the brain has been a major focus within the field of education in recent years. The hierarchical method of organizing information and how that maps well onto the brain's memory are concepts that that have proven extremely beneficial in classrooms.

Personality psychology

Initially discovered in research done at the U.S. Air Force Personnel Laboratory during the latter part of the 1950's, by Ernest Tupes & Raymond Cristal, the Big 5 personality traits have been a key component of the psychological understanding of personality. Those five traits include neuroticism, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, and are all either cognitive Cognitive therapeutic approaches have received considerable attention in the treatment of personality disorders in recent years. The approach focuses on the formation of what it believes to be faulty schemata, centralized on judgmental biases and general cognitive errors.

Cognitive psychology vs. cognitive science

The line between cognitive psychology and cognitive science can be a blurry one. The differentiation between the two is best understood in terms of cognitive psychology's relationship to applied psychology, and the understanding of psychological phenomena. Cognitive psychologists are often heavily involved in running psychological experiments involving human participants, with the goal of gathering information related to how the human mind takes in, processes, and acts upon inputs received from the outside world. The information gained in this area is then often used in the applied field of clinical psychology. One of the paradigms of cognitive psychology derived in this manner, is that every individual develops schemata which motivate the person to think or act in a particular way in the face of a particular circumstance. E.g., most people have a schema for waiting in line. When we approach some type of service counter where people are waiting their turn, we don't just walk to the front of the line and butt in. Our schema for that situation tells us to get in the back of the line. This, in turn, applies to the field of abnormal psychology as a result of individuals sometimes developing faulty schemata which lead them to consistently react in a dysfunctional manner. If a person has a schema that says "I am no good at making friends", they may become so reluctant to pursue interpersonal relationships that they become prone to seclusion.

Cognitive science is better understood as predominantly concerned with gathering data through research. Cognitive psychology envelopes a much broader scope, which has links to philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and particularly with artificial intelligence. It could be said that cognitive science provides the database of information that fuels the theory from which cognitive psychologists operate. Cognitive scientists' research mostly involves non-human subjects, allowing them to delve into areas which would come under ethical scrutiny if performed on human participants. I.e. They may do research implanting devices in the brains of rats to track the firing of neurons while the rat performs a particular task. Cognitive science is highly involved in the area of artificial intelligence and its application to the understanding of mental processes.

Criticisms

In its early years, critics held that the empiricism of cognitive psychology was incompatible with its acceptance of internal mental states. However, the sibling field of cognitive neuroscience has provided evidence of physiological brain states that directly correlate with mental states - thus providing support for the central assumption of cognitive psychology.

As cognitive psychology gained momentum as a movement, through the 1970's, the complexity of the processes involved in human thought, in the opinion of many, fractured studies of cognition so greatly that the field lost cohesion. John C. Malone poses the assertion, in his book: Psychology: Pythagoras to Present, that "Examinations of late twentieth-century textbooks dealing with 'cognitive psychology', 'human cognition', 'cognitive science', and the like quickly reveals that there are many, many varieties of cognitive psychology and very little agreement about exactly what may be its domain".

The information processing approach to cognitive functioning is currently being questioned by new approaches in psychology, such as dynamical systems, and the embodiment perspective.