Juber
Outline the cognitive approach (6 marks)
To briefly summarise, the cognitive approach is “conscious and unconscious thoughts/
mental processes that influence our behaviour”. There are many different types of cognitive
approaches and two of them are schemas and inferences.
Schemas are our own personal mental representations and understandings of the world
around us. It can be very useful as it helps predict world events based off of our past
experiences and enables us to process vast amounts of information without us being
overwhelmed. However, it can be not as useful as it can distort our interpretation of sensory
information and lead to perceptual errors or inaccurate memories.
Inferences are mental processes that have not or cannot be studied directly but must be
studied by inferring what goes on as a result of measuring behaviour. We use evidence
available to make these inferences and people do this on a daily basis without even realising
it.