Cognitive psychology facts for kids

Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain, which are critical in language

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how people think. It explores mental processes like attention, using language, memory, perception, solving problems, being creative, and reasoning. This field started in the 1960s. Before that, many scientists focused on behaviorism, which only studied things you could see. They thought mental processes were too hard to observe. But then, researchers in language, computer science, and other areas began to use models of how our minds work to explain human behavior. Ideas from cognitive psychology are now part of many other areas of psychology and other subjects like cognitive science and linguistics.

History of Understanding the Mind

People have wondered about the human mind for a very long time, even back to the ancient Greeks. Around 387 BCE, Plato thought the brain was where our mental processes happened. Later, in 1637, René Descartes suggested that humans have some ideas from birth. He also believed the mind and body were separate things. This led to big discussions about whether our thoughts come only from experiences (empiricism) or if we are born with some knowledge (nativism). Thinkers like George Berkeley and John Locke supported the idea of learning from experience. Immanuel Kant believed we have some inborn knowledge.

The mid-to-late 1800s were important for psychology becoming a science. Scientists made two key discoveries about the brain. Paul Broca found an area mostly responsible for speaking. Carl Wernicke found another area important for understanding language. These areas are now named after them. Problems with speaking or understanding language due to damage in these areas are called Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, behaviorism was the main way to study psychology. Behaviorists believed that thoughts, ideas, and consciousness couldn't be seen. So, they thought these things were not part of scientific psychology. However, some pioneers worked differently. Carl Jung wrote about cognitive functions in 1921. Jean Piaget also studied how children and adults think, use language, and develop intelligence from the 1920s to the 1980s. He did this outside the behaviorist way of thinking.

In the middle of the 20th century, four main things helped shape cognitive psychology:

• During World War II, new weapons needed soldiers to learn quickly. Understanding how people perform under pressure became very important. Behaviorism didn't offer many answers. Donald Broadbent helped by combining ideas about human performance with new information theory.
• Computers were developing rapidly. People started to compare how computers process information to how the human mind works. This opened up new ways of thinking about psychology. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon worked on artificial intelligence (AI). They later teamed up with cognitive psychologists to explore these ideas. This helped create the idea that our mental functions are like how computers store and get back information.
• In 1959, Noam Chomsky criticized behaviorism. This helped start what is called the "cognitive revolution." In psychology, researchers like J. S. Bruner and G. A. Austin wrote important books. In 1960, G. A. Miller, E. Galanter, and K. Pribram wrote "Plans and the Structure of Behavior." That same year, Bruner and Miller started the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies. This helped make cognitive science a real field.
• The field became more official with new research centers. For example, George Mandler opened the Center for Human Information Processing in 1964. Mandler later wrote about how cognitive psychology began.

Ulric Neisser made the term "cognitive psychology" popular with his 1967 book, Cognitive Psychology. Neisser explained that "cognition" means all the ways we take in information from our senses. This includes how we change, sort, store, find, and use that information. He said it even includes things like images in our minds or hallucinations when there's no real stimulation. Neisser believed that cognition is involved in almost everything a person does.

How Our Minds Process Information

Cognitive psychologists mainly study the mental processes that influence how we act. These processes include how our memory works in three main stages:

• Sensory memory: This holds information from our senses for a very short time.
• Short-term memory: This holds a small amount of information temporarily for us to think about. It also helps us get information from long-term memory.
• Long-term memory: This stores information for a long time. It receives information from short-term memory.

Attention: Focusing Your Mind

Attention is when you focus your awareness on a small part of all the information around you. A main job of attention is to find unimportant information and filter it out. This lets important information go to other mental processes. For example, your brain gets sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and touch information all at once. But your brain can only consciously deal with a small part of this. Attention helps you choose what to focus on.

Attention has two main ways of working:

• Exogenous control: This is automatic. It makes you notice sudden changes, like a loud noise or something popping out.
• Endogenous control: This is more deliberate. It's when you choose to focus, like when you are studying or trying to listen to one person in a crowd.

One interesting area in cognitive psychology is divided attention. Early studies looked at how people could listen to one conversation while hearing other sounds. This is called the dichotic listening task. Researchers found that people can focus on one message. But they are still somewhat aware of other information, even if they aren't consciously listening to it. For example, if you are told to listen for basketball news in one ear, you can follow it even if it switches ears. This ability to focus on one conversation in a noisy place is known as the cocktail party effect.

Memory: Storing and Recalling Information

The two main types of memory are short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory is now often called working memory. Cognitive psychologists often study memory by looking at working memory.

Working Memory: Your Mental Workspace

Working memory is more than just short-term memory. It's your ability to hold and process temporary information for daily tasks, even when there are distractions. The famous idea that we can remember about "seven plus or minus two" items comes from how working memory and long-term memory work together.

A classic experiment by Hermann Ebbinghaus showed the serial position effect. This means you remember words better from the beginning and end of a list than from the middle. This "primacy and recency effect" changes depending on how long the list is. If an attention-grabbing word is in the list, it can change this pattern. This is called the Von Restorff effect.

The Working Memory Model (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974, updated-2000)

Many models explain working memory. One well-known model is the Baddeley and Hitch model. It considers both what we see and hear. It also uses long-term memory as a reference. A central part of the brain combines and understands all this information.

Forgetting is a big part of memory. Psychologists debate if we forget because memories simply fade (decay theory) or because new information gets in the way (interference theory).

Long-Term Memory: Your Brain's Library

Modern ideas about memory usually focus on long-term memory. It's often divided into three main types:

• Procedural memory: This is memory for how to do things. It's often automatic, like riding a bike or driving a car. You don't have to think hard about each step.
• Semantic memory: This is your general knowledge, like facts and concepts. Knowing what the Eiffel Tower looks like or the capital of France are examples. Accessing this memory can take some effort, depending on how new the information is or how often you use it.
• Episodic memory: This is your memory of personal events. It includes things like what you did last weekend or where you were during a big news event. This type of memory often requires more conscious thought. It combines facts and time-related information to create a full memory.

Perception: Making Sense of the World

Perception involves both our physical senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch) and the mental processes that help us understand them. It's how we interpret what our senses tell us about the world. Early psychologists, like Edward Titchener, studied perception. They tried to break down human thought into its simplest parts by understanding how people perceive different things.

Today, cognitive psychologists look at specific ways our minds interpret sensory information. They also study how these interpretations affect our behavior. For example, researchers at the Center for Ecological Study of Perception and Action (CESPA) study how people see their physical surroundings. They also look at how this affects how they move through that environment.

Language: How We Communicate

Psychologists have been interested in how our minds handle language since the 1870s. That's when Carl Wernicke suggested a model for language processing. Today, cognitive psychologists study many aspects of language. They might look at how we learn language, how we form sounds (like phonemes), or how language affects our mood.

Much research focuses on when children learn language. This timing can help tell if a child has a learning disability or might develop one. A 2012 study showed this can be helpful. However, it's important to consider other factors. These include how much children vary, their family's financial situation, and their memory skills. This helps make sure assessments are fair and accurate.

Metacognition: Thinking About Your Thinking

Metacognition is basically thinking about your own thoughts. More specifically, it includes things like:

• How well you can check your own work on a task (self-regulation).
• Understanding what you are good at when it comes to mental tasks.
• Knowing how to use thinking strategies.

Much of the current research on metacognition focuses on how it helps in education. Improving students' metacognitive skills can greatly help their learning and study habits. A key part of this is helping students set goals and manage themselves to reach those goals. It's also important for students to realistically judge what they know and set goals they can actually achieve.

Some common experiences related to metacognition include:

• Déjà Vu: That feeling you've experienced something before, even if you haven't.
• Cryptomnesia: When you think of an idea and believe it's new, but it's actually a memory you forgot you had. This is also called unconscious plagiarism.
• False Fame Effect: When a non-famous name becomes famous just by being repeated.
• Validity effect: When statements seem more true just because you hear them many times.
• Imagination inflation: When you imagine something that didn't happen, and then you become more confident that it actually did happen.

New Ways of Looking at Cognition

Modern views often see cognition as having two main ways of processing information. Daniel Kahneman explained this in 2011. He called them intuition and reasoning. Intuition (or system 1) is fast and automatic. It often involves strong feelings and is based on habits. Kahneman said this type of thinking is hard to change. Reasoning (or system 2) is slower and more flexible. It involves conscious choices and attitudes.

How Cognitive Psychology Helps Us

Helping with Mental Health: Cognitive Behavior Therapy

After the cognitive revolution, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) developed. Aaron T. Beck is known as the father of cognitive therapy, a type of CBT. His work on understanding and treating depression is recognized worldwide. In his 1987 book, Cognitive Therapy of Depression, Beck explained why therapy is important for depression:

• Not everyone gets better with just medicine. Beck noted that only about 60-65% of patients responded to antidepressants. Recent studies show similar numbers.
• Many people who do take antidepressants stop using them. This can be due to side effects or personal reasons.
• Beck believed that relying on medicine too much might stop people from learning their own ways to cope. He thought that if people don't practice coping skills, they might struggle when they stop taking medicine. This could make them feel they need the medicine again.

Understanding Social Interactions

Many parts of modern social psychology come from cognitive psychology research. Social cognition is a specific part of social psychology. It focuses on how our minds process information about other people. Gordon B. Moskowitz defines social cognition as "the study of the mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of the people in our social world."

Models that explain how we process social information have been helpful. They help us understand aggressive behavior. Kenneth Dodge's model is one of the most supported. He found that children who are better at understanding social information often behave better. How children interact with others affects their relationships. His model says there are five steps people go through when interacting. How a person interprets social cues is key to how they react.

Child Development and Thinking

Many important developmental psychologists use cognitive models to understand how children grow. One major idea is the Theory of Mind (ToM). This is a person's ability to understand that others have their own thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Children usually fully develop ToM between ages 4 and 6. Before this, a child might not understand that others can think differently from them. Developing ToM is a type of metacognition, or thinking about one's thoughts. A child must realize they have their own thoughts and that others do too.

Jean Piaget, a leading developmental psychologist, studied cognitive development from birth to adulthood. While some parts of his stages of cognitive development have been challenged, they are still important in education. Piaget's ideas came before the cognitive revolution. However, they inspired much research in cognitive psychology. Many of his principles are now part of modern theories.

Improving Learning in Education

Modern education theories use many ideas from cognitive psychology. Some important concepts include:

• Metacognition: This is a broad idea about all your thoughts and knowledge about your own thinking. A key focus in education is self-monitoring. This is how well students can check what they know and use strategies to improve where they need help.
• Declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge: Declarative knowledge is your 'encyclopedia' of facts. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to do specific tasks. Using these ideas in education helps students connect facts to new skills. This helps them learn faster.
• Knowledge organization: How knowledge is organized in the brain has been a big focus in education. The idea of organizing information in a hierarchy, and how this fits with how our brain remembers, has been very useful in classrooms.

Understanding Personality

Cognitive therapy approaches have been used to help with personality challenges. This approach focuses on how people form mistaken ways of thinking. These can include biased judgments and common thinking errors.

Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science

Cognitive psychology is a main part of cognitive science. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field that studies the mind and mental functions. It looks at how these functions work in brains and machines. This field combines knowledge from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and anthropology.

Some people have said that cognitive science has become very similar to cognitive psychology. Some scholars even use the terms interchangeably. This is partly because it was hard to combine different fields of cognitive science early on. Over time, differences in words, methods, and theories made it challenging to bring the subjects together.

Things to Consider About Cognitive Psychology

Sometimes Lacks a Clear Focus

Some people suggest that as cognitive psychology grew in the 1970s, it became less unified. The many complex things it studied made it lose some cohesion. For example, one author noted that textbooks on "cognitive psychology" show many different types of cognitive psychology. There is little agreement on what its exact focus should be. This led to different models that questioned how information processing works in the mind.

Focuses Too Much on the Inner Mind

Recently, cognitive psychology has been criticized for focusing too much on what goes on inside the mind. Critics say it doesn't always consider outside influences enough. A newer approach, called 4E cognition, tries to show that thinking is embodied (connected to our body), embedded (in our environment), extended (beyond our brain), and enacted (through our actions).

Major Research Areas in Cognitive Psychology

Influential Cognitive Psychologists

See also

In Spanish: Psicología cognitiva para niños