Question

What types of questions or fields of study would interest cognitive psychologists?

Answer 1

Cognitive psychologists study the human thought process by examining how people process and store information, especially in regards to subjects like language, decision-making, deductive reasoning, and problem-solving. Their research consists of intensive study of the aforementioned subjects and then applying that information so they can help solve real-world problems and help people understand their behavior and the behavior of others better.

Social cognition is concerned with the processing, storage and application of social information. This research area is closely related to the field of cognitive psychology, this research area focuses largely on the concept of schemas. Schemas are our general ideas about the world, how things are and how things work. These mental shortcuts allow us to function without constantly stopping to interpret everything around us. We also develop associations between related schemas, which plays an important role in the thought process and social behavior.

Another major research area in social psychology involves the study of attitudes. Social psychologists are interested in the components of attitudes, how attitudes develop and how attitudes change. Researchers have described three core components of attitude: an affective component, a behavioral component and a cognitive component. Often referred to as the "ABC's of attitude," these elements describe how we feel, behave and understand.

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mental processes that underlie behavior. These mental processes comprise a number of areas, including attention, memory, perception, thinking, reasoning, problem solving, decision making, language, knowledge representation, mental imagery, and motivation and concept formation. This focus on mental processes contrasts with behaviorism, which studied only behaviors that could be directly observed. Cognitive psychology is flourishing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and its principles have been applied to clinical and counseling psychology, personality theory, developmental psychology, social psychology, comparative psychology, forensics and legal psychology, and education, among other disciplines. Other independent schools of thought have developed from cognitive psychology, including cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.

AREAS OF INTEREST IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Attention. This area of research looks at an array of topics that focus on our ability to pay attention to specific stimuli while excluding other stimuli (selective attention) or to pay attention to two stimuli at the same time (divided attention). Topics include pattern recognition, object recognition, selective attention, divided attention, and subliminal perception.

Perception. Perception is the use of previous knowledge to gather and interpret stimuli registered by the senses (Matlin 2005). This process actively organizes and interprets sensory information in order to make it meaningful. Perception is usually discussed in conjunction with sensory processes with simple stimuli, but it is also studied in terms of how it functions in more complex social situations. For example, if someone bumped into you while walking down the street, your perception of the incident might be dependent upon the characteristics of the other individual. You might interpret it as an accident if an elderly woman bumped into you, but your interpretation might be different if the other person was a member of a group of boisterous teenagers.

Memory. This broad area of research focuses on the encoding, storage, and retrieval processes involved when one remembers information at a later time. Experts generally agree that memories are a result of not only the specific event that is being remembered but also the specific thoughts, emotions, and knowledge that the rememberer possesses. Furthermore, events or thoughts that occur after the encoded event also have an impact on what is remembered.

Language. This area of research focuses on how humans (and nonhumans) acquire and use language. There is also a major focus on the specific language rules (or grammar) that accompany language processing.

Thinking. This broad area of research includes various topics such as problem solving, decision making, mental imagery, and logic. The general focus is on the internal thought processes. Such thought processes may occur prior to overt behavior or during overt behavior, or they may occur as a result of external stimuli. Cognitive neuroscience may use brain-imaging techniques to provide objective measurements of when thinking occurs and which part of the brain is active during specific tasks.

Knowledge Representation. This area of research investigates how information is stored and accessed by the brain. Much of the research in this area focuses on mental models that explain how knowledge is stored in the brain. The two main codes that have been proposed for knowledge representation are based upon analog or propositional codes. Other major areas of research include categorization and how people utilize schemas and scripts in everyday life.

Artificial Intelligence. The information-processing approach to cognitive psychology uses the computer as a model for the human mind. This branch of cognitive psychology led to connectionist frameworks and the parallel distributed processing approach to studying cognition. The analogy that is the basis for the study of artificial intelligence is that computer connections between stored knowledge or idea units are similar to the physical, neural networks present in the brain (McClelland and Rumelhart 1985).