The Cognitive approach
Summary:
 Human behaviour is caused by your internal
thinking process.
The cognitive approach is a relatively modern approach, starting the
early 1960s. Unlike Behaviourism or Psychoanalysis, there isn’t one
major theorist who has dominated this approach, and thus the
cognitive approach has been used for a wide range of topics in
Psychology including but not limited to; memory, intelligence, social
behaviour, and emotion.
Cognition literally means “knowing”.
In other words, psychologists from this approach study cognition
which is ‘the mental act or process by which knowledge is acquired.’
The first assumption of the cognitive approach is Behaviour is
controlled by our own thought processes.
The cognitive approach is based on how we
think, with the belief that our thought
processes affect the way in which we behave.
This approach came about in part due to the dissatisfaction with the
behavioural approach which focused on our visible behaviour
(Response), without understanding the internal processes that
create it. Therefore a lot of the cognitive approach is based upon
some aspects of the behaviourist approach, but with an added focus
on the intermediary process between Stimulus and Response.
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The second assumption is that our behaviour
can be explained as a series of responses to
external stimuli, much like a computer.
The cognitive approach is based on the principle
that our behaviour is generated by a series of
stimuli and responses, which are governed by our
thought processes.
This approach is based on the idea that the human mind works in a
similar fashion to computers.
Computers:
INPUT
(keyboard, mouse
etc.)
Processing
OUTPUT
(Printing etc.)
Thinking
Response
Humans:
Stimulus
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A cognitive psychologist might explain this
‘thinking’ in terms of schema driven
processing. Schemas are ways of organizing
knowledge and experience of the world into
generic ‘templates’ that are used to make
sense of objects, situations and people we encounter.
When you see a dog, what enables you to know it’s a dog? You have to
pay attention to, perceive its features (e.g. four legs, tail, fur),
search through your existing memory store to see if it matches any
existing schema, and act accordingly.
Four legs
Tail
Fur
Task:
What schema do you associate with the following;
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Apple
School
Rabbit
Psychology
Scary
Bank robbery
Love
Coffee
Money
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Stroke its head
saying;
“Who’s a good
boy?”
It might be that an arachnophobe’s schema for spiders contains the
information ‘they are dangerous’ and ‘to be avoided’. As a result,
whenever they encounter a stimulus that looks like a spider, they will
react with alarm.
Stimlus:
See a ‘spider’.
Schema processing:
“Spiders are
terrifying”
Response:
RUN AWAY!
Task:
Referring back to the list of stimulus you did for Behaviourism,
what were your internal thought processes to these stimuli, which
led to your response?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
You get out the shower and see a spider.
A violent scene comes on the television.
It starts raining and you’re outside.
A person you are attracted to sits next to you in class.
Your Psychology teacher is obviously in a mood already and you
haven’t done your homework.
6. You have just seen an advert for your favourite food.
Stimulus
Internal thought
process
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Response
This third assumption of the
cognitive approach is that human
behaviour can be explained as a
set of scientific processes, in an
objective and measurable way.
The cognitive approach attempts to
apply a scientific approach to human
behaviour.
Although cognitive psychologists focus on our internal, mental
processes (which can’t be seen), they would still advocate a
scientific approach to the study of human behaviour, one that should
be conducted under controlled experimental lab conditions.
Although we can’t see cognitive processes occurring, we can measure
the results of the processes
in a scientific, objective
way.
In other words, what people
‘say’ and how they ‘respond’
can be taken as valid
measures of their ‘thought
processes’.
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Strengths and weaknesses of the cognitive approach
Strengths
On major advantage of the cognitive approach,
especially when compared with behaviourism, is
its focus on the important ‘processes’ that
occur between Stimulus and Response.
Whereas behaviourists do not attempt to
investigate what goes on inside the ‘black box’,
cognitive psychologists have gone some way to explaining the
important mediational processes such as perception and memory can
affect the way we respond to the world around us.
This has helped explain, better than
behaviourism, the very practicalities
of human behaviour. For example,
how one person can react differently
to the same Stimulus (because they
perceive the Stimulus differently to
someone else).
Also it has led cognitive
psychologists to look at ways of improving people’s memories using
retrieval cues.
Such research can show us why we need to make shopping lists
before we go to the supermarket.
The list can act as a Stimulus that
activates certain schema in our
memories, leading to greater recall.
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 The cognitive approach has influenced
many areas of psychology, due to it being the
predominant approach after the 1960s. It has
been easily combined with other approachesCognitive Behavioural Therapy is a popular and
successful form of treatment for issues such as OCD, phobias
and depression.
As well as being usefully applied in
therapy, such as CBT, it has also been
applied to developmental psychology.
For example, theories about how
children’s thinking develops have
guided how we teach in schools. Piaget
(1970) developed one such theory,
suggesting that children’s thinking is
not like adults.
For example, children around the ages
of 8 or 9 cannot think in the abstract.
If they want to solve a mathematical
problem, they need to see it in
concrete terms, such as using
counting sticks. Piaget’s ideas had a
major impact on teaching in
primary schools because
teachers realised it was
important to demonstrate in
concrete terms, as opposed to
abstract ideas, when teaching
younger children.
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 Additionally, within social psychology, much of the thinking is
‘cognitive’ in nature, as it involves looking at the mental
processes involved in understanding the social world and people
around us. Cognitive psychology, for example, can explain why
we form certain stereotypes, and why we obey authority.
 One final strength is, like other approaches in psychology, the
cognitive approach is very scientific. Researchers can test
theories of ‘thinking processes’ by making clear predictions
about what they think will happen when people are exposed to
certain stimuli. These theories can then be tested to
demonstrate if they are true or not. Psychologists can do this
controlling as many variables
are possible, so we can truly
see if there is any kind of
causal relationship.
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Weaknesses of this approach
 A weakness of the cognitive
approach can be that it can
be too scientific. The
approach depends largely on
controlled experiments to
observe human behaviour,
which may lack ecological validity. This means that the
experiment was so controlled; it did not reflect how the world
really is.
 While the cognitive approach does consider
the influence of both internal & external factors
on behaviour (e.g. processes within the mind are
‘internal’ and the role of experience in the
formation of schemas is ‘external’), it fails to
consider important elements of both nature and
nurture.
For example the role of genes in human cognition is ignored,
yet research into intelligence has consistently looking at the
influence of genes, through the use
of twin studies.
Additionally, important social and
cultural factors (nurture) are often
ignored, which seems unrealistic. For
example, within the field of cognitive
development, key theorists such as
Piaget failed to consider the role of
culture and gender on the development of thinking children.
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 Another criticism of the cognitive approach is that it is
‘mechanistic’ – it portrays human behaviour as that of a
machine. Indeed the cognitive approach is based on the
‘behaviour’ of computers, so it is inevitable that the outcome
would be a rather mechanistic view of human behaviour.
The main objection to such mechanistic explanations is that
they ignore social and emotional factors.
In fact, in general, cognitive psychologists oversimplify
behaviour and are therefore reductionist- the cognitive
approach attempts to apply the scientific view to human
behaviour, which may be argued to be unique to each individual.
Humans may quite simply not be as simple or predictable as
cognitive theories suggest.
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Methodology
Cognitive psychologists follow the example of the behaviourists in
preferring objective, controlled, scientific methods for investigating
behaviour. They use the results of their investigations as the basis
for making inferences about mental processes. One strand of
cognitive research involves conducting case studies of people with
brain damage. Comparing their
performance on mental tasks with that of
uninjured people can help psychologists
understand which parts of the brain are
used to process which sorts of
information.
Other cognitive research may involve
manipulating either the information available to people (inputs) or
the ways they process it (processes) and seeing what effect this has
on some aspect of behaviour (outputs).
Laboratory experiments are often used for this as the laboratory
situation gives better opportunities than field settings for careful
manipulation and control of information processing and precise
measurement of cognitive performance.
Much like in behaviourism, one way in which control was achieved was
by using fairly sparse conditions so that the participants weren’t
distracted by irrelevant stimuli. This meant it would be easier to see
a causal link between the IV & DV, without any other possible
variables being an issue.
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An example of this type of research is the experiment into levels of
processing carried out by Craik and Tulving (1975).
They presented participants
with a series of words on a
screen and manipulated the way
the words were processed by
asking questions about their
appearance, sound or meaning.
They found that participants
recognized more of the words
they had processed the meaning
of than those they had
processed the appearance of,
suggesting that deeper
processing of information leads to more durable memory traces than
shallow processing does.
Remember this when you are revising! You remember things better
when you have answered questions on it, as opposed to just literally
read it.
On that note…
End of approach Task
Explain the 3 assumptions of cognitive approach
and give 2 strengths and 2 weaknesses
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