Cognitive Approach Psycholgy set 1

Cognitive Approach

A psychological perspective that focuses on how people think, perceive, remember, and solve problems.

Information Processing

The cognitive process of acquiring, storing, and manipulating information.

Attention

The cognitive process of selectively focusing on certain stimuli while ignoring others.

Memory

The cognitive process of encoding, storing, and retrieving information.

Perception

The cognitive process of interpreting and making sense of sensory information.

Problem-Solving

The cognitive process of finding solutions to challenges or obstacles.

Cognitive Therapy

A form of psychotherapy based on the cognitive approach, aimed at identifying and changing maladaptive thought patterns.

Schemas

Internal mental representations that influence how individuals interpret and respond to the world.

Computational Model

A cognitive model that compares the mind to a computer, focusing on the process of reaching behavioral output without specifying information processing.

Connectionist Model

A cognitive model that views the mind as a complex network of neurons, activating in known configurations that represent associations between stimuli.

Strengths of the approach

• Models have presented a useful means to help explain internal mental processes

• The approach provides a strong focus on internal mental processes, which behaviourists before did not.

• The experimental methods used by the approach are considered scientific.

Weaknesses of the approach

• It could be argued that cognitive models over-simplify explanations for complex mental processes.

• The data supporting cognitive theories often come from unrealistic tasks used in laboratory experiments, which puts the ecological validity of theories into question (i.e. whether or not they are truly representative of our normal cognitive patterns).

• Comparing a human mind to a machine or computer is arguably an unsophisticated analogy.