UNIT-I

Introduction to applied cognitive psychology

Cognition refers to the mental processes and activities related to acquiring, processing, storing, and
using information. It encompasses a wide range of mental functions that enable individuals to
understand, interact with, and navigate their environment. Cognition involves various processes,
both conscious and unconscious, that contribute to the way we perceive, think, remember, and
solve problems. Key components of cognition include:

1. Perception: The process by which sensory information from the environment is detected,
organized, and interpreted by the brain. This includes the senses of sight, hearing, touch,
taste, and smell.

2. Attention: The ability to focus on specific stimuli or tasks while ignoring others. Attention
plays a crucial role in filtering information and allocating mental resources to relevant
aspects of the environment.

3. Memory: The capacity to store, retain, and recall information over time. Memory is often
classified into different types, including sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term
memory.

4. Language: The use of symbols, such as words and gestures, to convey meaning. Language
involves various cognitive processes, including comprehension, production, and
communication.

5. Thinking: The mental processes involved in problem-solving, decision-making, planning, and

reasoning. Thinking encompasses both conscious and unconscious cognitive activities that
allow individuals to navigate complex situations.

6. Problem-Solving: The ability to find solutions to challenges or achieve goals. Problem-solving

often involves the application of reasoning, critical thinking, and creativity.

7. Decision-Making: The process of selecting a course of action from multiple alternatives.

Decision-making relies on evaluating information, considering consequences, and making
choices based on personal preferences or goals.

8. Learning: The acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or instruction.

Learning involves various cognitive processes, including perception, memory, and problem-
solving.

9. Metacognition: Awareness and understanding of one's own cognitive processes. This

includes the ability to monitor and regulate one's thinking, such as planning, setting goals,
and evaluating performance.

Cognitive psychology is the study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about
information. A cognitive psychologist might study how people perceive various shapes, why they
remember some facts but forget others, or how they learn language.
History of Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology has roots in many different ideas and approaches. The approaches that will be
examined include early approaches such as structuralism and functionalism, followed by a discussion
of associationism, behaviourism, and Gestalt psychology.

1. Structuralism: Structuralism was the first major school of thought in psychology. Structuralism
seeks to understand the structure (configuration of elements) of the mind and its perceptions by
analyzing those perceptions into their constituent components (affection, attention, memory,
sensation, etc.). Consider, for example, the perception of a flower. Structuralists would analyze this
perception in terms of its constituent colors, geometric forms, size relations, and so on. In terms of
the human mind, structuralists sought to deconstruct the mind into its elementary components;
they were also interested in how those elementary components work together to create the mind.

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was a German psychologist whose ideas contributed to the
development of structuralism. Wundt is often viewed as the founder of structuralism in psychology.
Wundt used a variety of methods in his research. One of these methods was introspection.
Introspection is a deliberate looking inward at pieces of information passing through consciousness.
The aim of introspection is to look at the elementary components of an object or process.

Wundt had many followers. One was an American student, Edward Titchener. Titchener is
sometimes viewed as the first full-fledged structuralist. In any case, he certainly helped bring
structuralism to the United States. His experiments relied solely on the use of introspection,
exploring psychology from the vantage point of the experiencing individual.

2. Functionalism: Functionalism seeks to understand what people do and why they do it. This
principal question about processes was in contrast to that of the structuralists, who had asked what
the elementary contents (structures) of the human mind are. Functionalists held that the key to
understanding the human mind and behavior was to study the processes of how and why the mind
works as it does, rather than to study the structural contents and elements of the mind. They were
particularly interested in the practical applications of their research.

A leader in guiding functionalism toward pragmatism was William James. His chief functional
contribution to the field of psychology was a single book: his landmark Principles of Psychology. Even
today, cognitive psychologists frequently point to the writings of James in discussions of core topics
in the field, such as attention, consciousness, and perception. John Dewey was another early
pragmatist who profoundly influenced contemporary thinking in cognitive psychology. Dewey is
remembered primarily for his pragmatic approach to thinking and schooling. Although functionalists
were interested in how people learn, they did not really specify a mechanism by which learning
takes place. This task was taken up by another group, Associationists.

3. Associationism: Associationism, like functionalism, was more of an influential way of thinking than
a rigid school of psychology. Associationism examines how elements of the mind, like events or
ideas, can become associated with one another in the mind to result in a form of learning.

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) was the first experimenter to apply associationist principles
systematically. Specifically, Ebbinghaus studied his own mental processes. He made up lists of
nonsense syllables that consisted of a consonant and a vowel followed by another consonant (e.g.,
zax). He then took careful note of how long it took him to memorize those lists. He counted his
errors and recorded his response times. Through his self-observations, Ebbinghaus studied how
people learn and remember material through rehearsal, the conscious repetition of material to be
learned. Among other things, he found that frequent repetition can fix mental associations more
firmly in memory. Thus, repetition aids in learning.

Another influential associationist, Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949), held that the role of
“satisfaction” is the key to forming associations. Thorndike termed this principle the law of effect.

4. Behaviorism: Behaviorism focuses only on the relation between observable behavior and
environmental events or stimuli. The idea was to make physical whatever others might have called
“mental” (Lycan, 2003). Some of these researchers, like Thorndike and other associationists, studied
responses that were voluntary.

In Russia, Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) studied involuntary learning
behavior of this sort. He began with the observation that dogs salivated in response to the sight of
the lab technician who fed them. This response occurred before the dogs even saw whether the
technician had food. To Pavlov, this response indicated a form of learning (classically conditioned
learning), over which the dogs had no conscious control. In the dogs’ minds, some type of
involuntary learning linked the technician to the food (Pavlov, 1955). Pavlov’s landmark work paved
the way for the development of behaviorism. His ideas were made known in the United States
especially through the work of John B. Watson.

Behaviorism may be considered an extreme version of associationism. It focuses entirely on the

association between the environment and an observable behavior. The “father” of radical
behaviorism is John Watson. Watson had no use for internal mental contents or mechanisms. He
believed that psychologists should concentrate only on the study of observable behavior. He
dismissed thinking as nothing more than subvocalized speech. Behaviorism also differed from
previous movements in psychology by shifting the emphasis of experimental research from human
to animal participants. Historically, much behaviorist work has been conducted (and still is) with
laboratory animals, such as rats or pigeons, because these animals allow for much greater behavioral
control of relationships between the environment and the behavior emitted in reaction to it
(although behaviorists also have conducted experiments with humans). One problem with using
nonhuman animals, however, is determining whether the research can be generalized to humans
(i.e., applied more generally to humans instead of just to the kinds of nonhuman animals that were
studied)

B. F. Skinner, a radical behaviorist, believed that virtually all forms of human behavior, not just
learning, could be explained by behavior emitted in reaction to the environment. Skinner conducted
research primarily with non-human animals. He rejected mental mechanisms. He believed instead
that operant conditioning- could explain all forms of human behavior. Skinner applied his
experimental analysis of behavior to many psychological phenomena, such as learning, language
acquisition, and problem solving. Largely because of Skinner’s towering presence, behaviorism
dominated the discipline of psychology for several decades.

5. Gestalt Psychology: Gestalt psychology states that we best understand psychological phenomena
when we view them as organized, structured wholes. According to this view, we cannot fully
understand behavior when we only break phenomena down into smaller parts. For example,
behaviorists tended to study problem solving by looking for subvocal processing—they were looking
for the observable behavior through which problem solving can be understood. Gestaltists, in
contrast, studied insight, seeking to understand the unobservable mental event by which someone
goes from having no idea about how to solve a problem to understanding it fully in what seems a
mere moment of time.

The maxim “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” aptly sums up the Gestalt perspective. To
understand the perception of a flower, for example, we would have to take into account the whole
of the experience. We could not understand such a perception merely in terms of a description of
forms, colors, sizes, and so on. Similarly, as noted in the previous paragraph, we could not
understand problem solving merely by looking at minute elements of observable behavior.

6.Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT): The practical application of cognitive psychology in therapy

became evident with the development of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in the 1960s and 1970s.
Psychologists like Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis integrated cognitive principles into therapeutic
approaches, demonstrating the practical implications of cognitive psychology.

7. Contemporary Developments: Cognitive psychology continues to evolve, incorporating insights

from various subfields such as cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and artificial
intelligence. Ongoing research explores topics like decision-making, emotion, consciousness, and the
interaction between cognition and culture.