Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology studies the mechanisms underlying mental processes: perception, memory, language, decision making.

Why is the field hard to do well?

Everyday tasks pull on several mechanisms at once, and the field’s main tension is balancing experimental control against real-world relevance.

A clean experiment can tell you nothing about how people actually live; observing people in the wild leaves causes unclear.

Philosophical roots

• Empiricism: knowledge comes from experience, the mind starts as a blank slate
• Nativism: some cognitive abilities are innate

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 (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 a way of thinking about how the mind works:

• Information Processing Approach: cognition as information flowing through stages
• Connectionism: cognition from networks of simple units, distributed and parallel
• Evolutionary: cognitive processes shaped by evolutionary pressures; we may be especially strong at social-survival problems
• Ecological: 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