Cognitive Psychology
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This paper is an examination of a relatively recent development in the field of psychology, the branch referred to as cognitive psychology. Although early psychologists attempted to understand the workings of the mind by studying and cataloguing their own thoughts through introspection, most pioneers in the field rejected such endeavors as being too unreliable and unscientific. Only with the development of computers did a cognitive approach begin to achieve respectability. As scientists and engineers started to work on the problem of creating artificial intelligence, psychologists began to see ways in which the workings of the human mind could be modeled and studied objectively. Since the 1960s, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience have been growing rapidly as credible fields of study. Early cognitive psychologists focused on understanding the ways in which external stimuli are perceived and attended to, but more recent studies have given greater emphasis to the higher mental processes in which the mind encodes, decodes, and uses such stimuli. This paper will also consider some of the ways in which an understanding of cognitive psychology has become applicable to other fields, from education to criminal justice, art history, and pain management. Is a Psychology of Cognition Possible? Psychology as a whole is a modern field of study. Although scholars have always been interested in understanding how the human mind works, psychology as
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itive processes of man, the kind of thinking your brain makes possible, both peripherally and centrally, are essentially the same the world over . . . What is different . . . is the frame of thought within which people view the world, the conceptions of the world that they have (Miller, 1983, p. 201).
Perception forms the first frame for sensory stimuli transmitted to the brain.
In the case of visual perception, for example, the brain performs a series of search and segregation tasks, trying to make sense of the image by comparing it to previously received structures and patterns. The brain learns to translate the signals received through the sensory network into comprehensible information, looking for recognizable features, common patterns, and even clues that allow it to use two-dimensional representations to deal with and make sense of a three-dimensional environment. Miller (1983) writes, "It is widely recognised that perception can no longer be explained in terms of passive reception, and that the mind is furnished with active powers of creative conjecture without which the information provided by the senses would remain disorganised and chaotic" (p. 10). This recognition of the brain's active, creative participation i
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Thomas Butler, Stimuli Miller, Clifford Geertz, Susan Greenfield, John Anderson, Howard Gardner, , Conclusions Beloff, John Biggs, Broader Applications, cognitive psychology, miller 1983, field study, anderson 1995, aleksander 1996, mental processes, greenfield 1997, cognitive psychologists, human cognition, human mind, aleksander 1996 writes, workings human mind, cognitive psychology help, electrical signals arriving, miller 1983 writes,
Approximate Word count = 4887
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)
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