What are the core mental processes studied in cognitive psychology?

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes and internal states that behaviorism previously dismissed as unobservable. It focuses on how people acquire, store, retrieve, transform, and apply information through systems like perception, memory, and reasoning. Emerging during the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, it treats the mind as an information-processing system.

What we know

• Cognitive psychology scientifically studies human mental processes including attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. [2]
• The field originated in the 1960s as a break from behaviorism, utilizing models of mental processing to explain human behavior. [2]
• Cognition encompasses mental activities that deal with knowledge by acquiring, storing, retrieving, transforming, or applying information. [4]
• Theoretical frameworks modeling the mind include classical computationalism, connectionism, and representationalism. [4]

Still open

• Sources note a theoretical division between representationalism and anti-representationalism regarding whether cognitive processes operate on internal world representations.

Where to go next

• whenHow did the cognitive revolution replace behaviorism?
• how it workedWhat is classical computationalism in the study of the mind?
• compared withHow does connectionism model neural networks?
• the bigger pictureWhat role does linguistics play in cognitive science?
• a case in pointHow do human memory systems store and retrieve information?
• an unexpected connectionHow did cybernetics and economics adopt cognitive models?Work derived from cognitive psychology expanded far beyond traditional psychology to influence modern disciplines like economics and linguistics.

Sources

• [1]cognitive psychology (Wikidata Q23373) · CC0 1.0
• [2]Cognitive psychology · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [3]Cognitivism (psychology) · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [4]Cognition · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [5]Cognitive revolution · CC BY-SA 4.0

Your path

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8. /What are the core mental processes studied in cognitive psychology?