Cognitive Psychology: Mental Processes and Applications

Foundations and scope of cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes that influence behavior, including attention, perception, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, creativity, and decision-making. It emerged as a formal field during the 1960s in reaction to behaviorism, which had largely excluded unobservable mental processes from scientific psychology. Its development was influenced by philosophical debates about innate knowledge and experience, discoveries about brain regions involved in language, information-processing theory, computer science, artificial intelligence, military research, and Noam Chomsky's critique of behaviorism. The field examines how people receive, transform, store, retrieve, interpret, and use information. Its scope includes sensory and working memory, long-term memory, selective and divided attention, perception, language acquisition and processing, and metacognition. Modern cognitive psychology also investigates theories such as dual-process models of fast intuition and slower reasoning, and it contributes to cognitive science, linguistics, economics, cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, education, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Although some theoretical debates remain, cognitive psychology broadly connects mental representations and information processing with observable behavior and brain activity.

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Historical development of cognitive psychology

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