The Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Psychology - Cognition, grade: 1, Egerton University, language: English, abstract: This essay will give an overview of the evolution of cognitive psychology. It will discuss the emergence of cognitive psychology and its interdisciplinary perspective. It will also assess the effects of the decline of behaviorism on the discipline of cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is one of the core branches of psychology that is concerned with the study of mental processes. It deals with mental processes involving the use of the brain in problem-solving, memory and language. Cognitive psychology attempts to explain the correlation between the biological functions of the brain and the human mind in understanding the ambient environment. As such, it explains how individuals diagnose life issues, understand and solve problems in the day-to-day lives through their mental processes, which plays the principal role of mediating between stimulus from the environment and the response. Ordinarily, human beings exhibit several psychological manifestations. For instance, people possess the thinking ability, which enables them to reason out on diverse aspects of life, and they are also able to remember past events in their lives. They also portray perception on new happenings in life in an attempt to construct a realistic way of reasoning to unravel mysterious phenomena. Moreover, human beings have the ability to learn new skills from their day-to-day experiences and keep the memory of different episodes. From a psychological perspective, these are all the works of cognition. Ideally, cognition refers to thinking, a mental process through which people learn; reason and solve problems. So cognitive psychologists focus on how human beings acquire information from the environment, especially in the form of a stimulus and process it through mental cognitive processes. The processed information is then stored to keep the memory of life events. Cognitive psychology tends to focus on biology more than psychology; thus, it shows a significant lack of the behaviorism aspect of classical psychology.