Cognitive Psychology

What is Cognitive Psychology?

Cognitive psychology is essentially the psychology of knowledge and information. As such, it includes the study of such processes as learning, memory, and rational thought. These areas of human behavior are extremely difficult to study, so cognitive psychology draws on the intellectual resources of several other disciplines, including linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience, to try to understand the complex processes of human cognition.

The reason why cognitive psychology is such a difficult area is because it is the only sub-field of psychology that studies internal mental processes instead of observable behaviors. This makes it extremely difficult to design experiments that will test for cognitive processes, and equally hard to interpret the results of those experiments once they are performed. The central methodological tenet of cognitive psychology is that it relies on empirical studies rather than subjective reports and perceptions. Cognitive psychology represents an attempt by behavioral scientists to wade into some of the deepest and most mysterious waters of the human mind: the waters of thought, memory, and consciousness itself.

Who Should Study Cognitive Psychology?

Cognitive psychology is a highly theoretical field with few direct practical applications. It studies processes that underlie all other psychological theories (educational psychologists, for example, base some of their theories on ideas generated by cognitive psychologists), but it is so complex and ambiguous that it is difficult to make direct connections between cognitive psychology and the applied areas. Essentially, the problem is that cognitive psychologists are trying to bridge a major gap in psychological knowledge: the gap between mind and brain. Neuroscientists have some understanding of how the brain processes information at the smallest scale, and behavioral scientists have some understanding of how human beings use that information at the large scale, but cognitive psychologists attempt to understand the middle-scale that lies in between these two areas.

All of this means that anyone who specializes in cognitive psychology should be prepared for a career based around research and teaching, rather than one that focuses on practice. If you plan to specialize in this field, consider whether an academic career is right for you. If it’s not, then cognitive psychology may not be the right area of study for you.

Cognitive psychology, however, is of great interest to non-specialists in many other fields. Anyone who is interested in education, philosophy, and even certain fields of engineering, not to mention other areas of psychology, can benefit from taking at least one or two courses in the psychology of thought and memory, or perhaps picking up a few books on the subject.

The History of Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is the philosophical descendant of epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge. However, whereas epistemology is the study of what knowledge is and what it means, cognitive psychology is the study of how human beings store, process, and understand information. In short, epistemology is the what of knowledge, and cognitive psychology is the how.

In its modern form, cognitive psychology is the result of psychologists in the 1960s and 70s who, inspired by developments in linguistics and computer engineering, began to conceive of human behavior in a “computational” model. They saw human beings as essentially engaged in a process of assimilating, storing, processing, and sharing information or data. Human beings, on this model, were like very large and complex computers. This revolutionary new way of looking at human behavior was heavily influential across the psychological spectrum, and spawned a new discipline that we today call cognitive psychology.