Cognitive Psychology

 

Cognitive psychology refers to an approach to, or branch of, psychology that emphasizes the understanding of behaviour and knowledge acquisition through the study of underlying mental processes such as perception, intuition, attention, memory, problem-solving, and reasoning.  As an emerging discipline, cognitive psychology links to or integrates concepts from fields including epistemology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and intelligence.  If one of the core focuses of cognitive psychology is to understand how one acquires, processes and stores information, then in educational psychology, cognitive psychology serves the purposes such as enhancing memory, self-monitoring, knowledge organization, and structuring educational curricula to enhance learning (Reif, 2008).

 

Cognitive psychology give rise to the applied development of psychological fields such as social, developmental, educational, abnormal, and personality.  As suggested above, recent development of educational psychology is influenced by cognitive psychology significantly.  Many contemporary educational psychology theories and concepts are the focal points of cognitive psychology.  For examples, (1) the integration of declarative and procedural knowledge which refers to accelerate learning by augmenting learners’ ability to integrate encyclopedic knowledge into newly learned procedures; (2) knowledge organization refers to the understanding of how knowledge is organized in the brain which in turn benefits curricula and instructional design in the classroom settings; and most importantly (3) self-monitoring refers to the one’s thoughts and knowledge about one’s own thinking and be able to exercise evaluation of personal knowledge and apply strategies such as self-regulation and self-efficacy to improve learning and areas where knowledge is lacking (Reif, 2008).   

 

The other important development is social psychology, more specifically social cognition.  Social cognition refers to how individuals make sense of the people around them in their respective social community.  Similar to educational psychology theories, social cognition theories and processes have been the focus within cognitive psychology researches pertaining human interactions (Moskowitz, 2004).  For example, social information processing refers to one’s ability to process social information that results in either social acceptable or unacceptable behaviours.  The understanding of the evaluative and interpretative processes of interactions with other individuals helps psychologists and scientists to correlate the reactionary process (Moskowitz, 2004).     

 

References:

 

Moskowitz, G. B. (2004).  Social cognition: Understanding self and others.  New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

 

Reif, F. (2008).  Applying cognitive science to education: Thinking and learning in scientific and other complex domains.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.