COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
WHAT IS COGNITION?
The collection of mental processes and
activities used in perceiving, learning,
remembering, thinking, and understanding,
and the act of using those processes.
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
A more recent approach - a belief
that much of human behavior can
be understood in terms of how
people think.
DEFINITION
Cognitive Psychology is the scientific study of
thinking mind
and is concerned with:
How we attend to and gain information about
the world
How that information is stored and processed
by the brain
How we solve problems, think, and formulate
language
NATURE
• Cognitive psychology is a school of thought in
psychology that examines internal mental processes
such as
• PROBLEM SOLVING
• MEMORY
• LANGUAGE
• It also has its foundations in the Gestalt psychology.
• Perception – interpreting sensory information to yield
meaningful information
• Attention – mentally focusing on a stimulus
• Memory – storage and retrieval of cognitions
• Language – communication between two subjects, that
has 1) rules (grammar) and 2) ways of communicating
novel ideas/thoughts, etc.
• Reasoning/decision making – making a conclusion from
information/selecting a course of action from different
possibilities
Major Contributors in the field of
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
•Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886-1969)
•Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
•George A. Miller (1920-2012)
•Noam Chomsky (1928-Present)
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD)
• Language acquisition device (LAD) – a hypothetical
mechanism of brain, developed by Noam Chomsky,
which has access to the grammatical rules of all
human languages (Universal grammar - UG).
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD)
• Chomsky concluded that children must have an inborn
faculty for language acquisition.
• According to this theory, the process is biologically
determined- the human species has evolved a brain
whose neural circuits contain linguistic information at
birth.
• The child's natural predisposition to learn language is
triggered by hearing speech and the child's brain is
able to interpret what s/he hears according to the
underlying principles or structures it already contains.
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD)
• This natural faculty has become known as the Language
Acquisition Device (LAD). Chomsky did not suggest that
an English child is born knowing anything specific about
English, of course.
• He stated that all human languages share common
principles (For example, they all have words for things
and actions - nouns and verbs). It is the child's task to
establish how the specific language s/he hears
expresses these underlying principles.
Information-Processing Psychology
• Type of cognitive psychology that took the computer
program as a metaphor for the workings of the mind.
• Human mind and computer programs – both are general
problem-solving devices
• Input – stimulus
• Output – response and behavior
• Storage, encoding, processing, retrieval, etc. – information
processing events
• Information processing psychologists usually concentrate
their research on normal, rational thinking and behavior and
view the human as an active seeker and user of information.
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