Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human

mental process Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, i ...

es such as

attention Attention or focus, is the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. It is the selective concentration on discrete information, either subjectively or objectively. William James (1890) wrote that "Atte ...

, language use,

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...

, problem solving,

creativity Creativity is the ability to form novel and valuable Idea, ideas or works using one's imagination. Products of creativity may be intangible (e.g. an idea, scientific theory, Literature, literary work, musical composition, or joke), or a physica ...

, and

reason Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, religion, scien ...

ing. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from

behaviorism Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that indivi ...

, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the

realm A realm is a community or territory over which a sovereign rules. The term is commonly used to describe a monarchical or dynastic state. A realm may also be a subdivision within an empire, if it has its own monarch, e.g. the German Empire. Etymo ...

of empirical science. This break came as researchers in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and

cybernetics Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a system's actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system, influencing subsequent action. It is concerned with ...

, as well as

applied psychology Applied psychology is the use of psychological methods and findings of scientific psychology to solve practical problems of human and animal behavior and experience. Educational and organizational psychology, business management, law, health, pro ...

, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines like

cognitive science Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...

, and

economics Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...

History

Philosophically, ruminations on the human mind and its processes have been around since the times of the

ancient Greeks Ancient Greece () was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (), that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically re ...

. In 387 BCE,

Plato Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...

had suggested that the brain was the seat of the mental processes. In 1637,

René Descartes René Descartes ( , ; ; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and Modern science, science. Mathematics was paramou ...

posited that humans are born with

innate {{Short pages monitor Thinking *

Choice A choice is the range of different things from which a being can choose. The arrival at a choice may incorporate Motivation, motivators and Choice modelling, models. Freedom of choice is generally cherished, whereas a severely limited or arti ...

( Glasser's theory) *

Concept formation Concept learning, also known as category learning, concept attainment, and concept formation, is defined by Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin (1956) as "the search for and testing of attributes that can be used to distinguish exemplars from non exemplar ...

Decision-making In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the Cognition, cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be ...

Logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the study of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It examines how conclusions follow from premises based on the structure o ...

* Psychology of reasoning *

Problem solving Problem solving is the process of achieving a goal by overcoming obstacles, a frequent part of most activities. Problems in need of solutions range from simple personal tasks (e.g. how to turn on an appliance) to complex issues in business an ...

Executive functions In cognitive science and neuropsychology, executive functions (collectively referred to as executive function and cognitive control) are a set of cognitive processes that support goal-directed behavior, by regulating thoughts and actions thro ...

Influential cognitive psychologists

* John R. Anderson *

Alan Baddeley Alan David Baddeley CBE Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS (born 23 March 1934) is a British psychologist. He is known for his research on memory and for developing the three-component model of working memory. He is a professor of psychology at th ...

David Ausubel David Paul Ausubel (October 25, 1918 – July 9, 2008) was an American psychologist. His most significant contribution to the fields of educational psychology, cognitive science, and science education learning was on the development and researc ...

Albert Bandura Albert Bandura (4 December 1925 – 26 July 2021) was a Canadian-American psychologist and professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University, who contributed to the fields of education and to the fields of psychology, e.g. social ...

Frederic Bartlett Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS (20 October 1886 – 30 September 1969) was a British psychologist and the first professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge. He was one of the forerunners o ...

* Elizabeth Bates * Aaron T. Beck * Robert Bjork * Paul Bloom *

Gordon H. Bower Gordon Howard Bower (December 30, 1932 – June 17, 2020) was a cognitive psychologist studying human memory, language comprehension, emotion, and behavior modification. He received his Doctor of Philosophy, Ph.D. in learning theory (education), ...

* Donald Broadbent *

Jerome Bruner Jerome Seymour Bruner (October 1, 1915 – June 5, 2016) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory (education), learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was ...

* Susan Carey *

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...

* Fergus Craik * Antonio Damasio *

Hermann Ebbinghaus Hermann Ebbinghaus (24 January 1850 – 26 February 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory. Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was the first person to describe the learnin ...

Albert Ellis Albert Ellis (September 27, 1913 – July 24, 2007) was an American psychologist and psychotherapist who founded rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). He held MA and PhD degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and was cer ...

* K. Anders Ericsson * William Estes * Eugene Galanter *

Vittorio Gallese Vittorio Gallese is professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma, Italy, and was professor in Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London, UK (2016–2018). He is an expert in neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, social neu ...

* Michael Gazzaniga * Dedre Gentner * Vittorio Guidano * Philip Johnson-Laird *

Daniel Kahneman Daniel Kahneman (; ; March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist best known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memor ...

* Nancy Kanwisher * Eric Lenneberg * Alan Leslie * Willem Levelt * Elizabeth Loftus *

Alexander Luria Alexander Romanovich Luria (; , ; 16 July 1902 – 14 August 1977) was a Soviet neuropsychology, neuropsychologist, often credited as a father of modern neuropsychology. He developed an extensive and original battery of neuropsychological ...

* Brian MacWhinney * George Mandler * Jean Matter Mandler * Ellen Markman * James McClelland *

George Armitage Miller George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller ...

* Ulrich Neisser *

Allen Newell Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and D ...

* Allan Paivio * Seymour Papert *

Jean Piaget Jean William Fritz Piaget (, ; ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called genetic epistemology. ...

Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychology, cognitive psychologist, psycholinguistics, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psycholo ...

* Michael Posner * Karl H. Pribram * Giacomo Rizzolatti * Henry L. Roediger III *

Eleanor Rosch Eleanor Rosch (once known as Eleanor Rosch Heider;"Natural Categories", Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 3, (May 1973), p. 328. born 9 July 1938) is an American psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berk ...

David Rumelhart David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of cognition, human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbo ...

* Eleanor Saffran * Daniel Schacter * Otto Selz *

Roger Shepard Roger Newland Shepard (January 30, 1929 – May 30, 2022) was an American cognitive science, cognitive scientist and author of the "universal law of generalization" (1987). He was considered a father of research on spatial relations. He studied m ...

* Richard Shiffrin * Herbert A. Simon *

George Sperling George Sperling (born 1934) is an American cognitive psychologist, researcher, and educator. Sperling documented the existence of iconic memory (one of the sensory memory subtypes). Through several experiments, he showed support for his hypoth ...

* Robert Sternberg * Larry Squire * Saul Sternberg * Anne Treisman * Endel Tulving *

Amos Tversky Amos Nathan Tversky (; March 16, 1937 – June 2, 1996) was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. Much of his early work concerned th ...

* Lev Vygotsky

References

External links

* *
Cognitive psychology
article in

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Laboratory for Rational Decision Making
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cognitive Psychology 1967 introductions Behavioural sciences Cognition

History

Influential cognitive psychologists

See also

References

Further reading

External links