Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology tries to uncover the mechanisms underlying mental processes — perception, memory, language, decision making. Everyday tasks pull on several of these at once.
The main tension in the field is balancing experimental control against real-world relevance. You can run a very clean experiment that tells you nothing about how people actually live, or you can observe people in the wild and have no idea what’s causing what.
Philosophical roots
- Empiricism — knowledge comes from experience, the mind starts as a blank slate
- Nativism — some cognitive abilities are innate / biologically built in
This debate still shows up today, especially in language and development.
Early schools
- Structuralism — find the building blocks of conscious experience
- Functionalism — understand what the mind does and why
- Behaviorism — study only observable behavior
- Gestalt Psychology — the mind perceives organized wholes
- Individual differences — Sir Francis Galton; how people differ in cognitive abilities, influenced later work on testing and intelligence
Then came the Cognitive Revolution, which opened the black box again.
Major paradigms today
A paradigm is just a way of thinking about how the mind works. Four main ones:
- Information Processing Approach — cognition as information flowing through stages
- Connectionism — cognition from networks of simple units, distributed and parallel
- Evolutionary approach — cognitive processes shaped by evolutionary pressures; we might be especially strong at social-survival problems
- Ecological approach — cognition depends on context, environment, and culture, so you have to study it in natural settings too
Methods
- True experiment = random assignment, supports causal claims
- Between-subjects = different participants in different conditions
- Within-subjects = same participants across multiple conditions
- Quasi-experiment = no random assignment, even if it still compares groups