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Cognitive Psychology
A branch of psychology which is concerned with the study of cognitions.
Cognitive psychologists focus on our mental processes or cognitions. These mental processes that cognitive psychologists focus on include memory, perception, thinking and language.
The main concern of Cognitive Psychology is how information received from our senses is processed by the Brain and how this processing directs how we behave.
Cognitive processes are examples of hypothetical constructs. That is, we cannot directly see processes such as thinking but we can infer what a person is thinking based on how they act.
Cognitive psychology has been influenced by developments in computer science and analogies are often made between how a computer works and how we process information.
However we are much more sophisticated than computer systems and an important criticism directed at the cognitive approach is that it often ignores the way in which other factors, such as past experiences and Culture influence how we process information.
