Define cognitive psychology and describe the domains of cognitive psychology.

Cognitive psychology: Cognitive psychology involves the study of internal mental processes-all of the things that go on inside your brain, including perception, thinking, memory, attention, language, problem-solving, and learning.

While it is a relatively young branch of psychology, it has quickly grown to become one of the most popular subfields. There are numerous practical applications for this cognitive research, such as providing help coping with memory disorders, increasing decision-making accuracy, finding ways to help people recover from brain injury, treating learning disorders, and structuring educational curricula to enhance learning. 

Learning more about how people think and process information not only helps researchers gain a deeper understanding of how the human brain works, but it allows psychologists to develop new ways of helping people deal with psychological difficulties. For example, by recognizing that attention is both a selective and limited resource, psychologists are able to come up with solutions that make it easier for people with attentional difficulties to improve their focus and concentration.

Findings from cognitive psychology have also improved our understanding of how people form, store, and recall memories. By knowing more about how these processes work, psychologists can develop new ways of helping people improve their memories and combat potential memory problems.

For example, psychologists have found that while your short-term memory is quite short and limited (lasting just 20 to 30 seconds and capable of holding between five and nine items), rehearsal strategies can improve the chances that information will be transferred to long-term memory, which is much more stable and durable.

Domains of Cognitive Psychology:

Modern cognitive psychology freely, draws theories and techniques; from twelve principal areas of research. Each area, in brief, is described below:

i) Cognitive Neuroscience: Only within the past few years have cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists formed a close working relationship. Thus far, this union has produced some of the most provocative developments in the study of our mental character.

Cognitive psychologists are seeking neurological explanations for their findings, and neuroscientists are turning to cognitive psychologists to explain observations made in their laboratories.

ii) Perception: The branch of psychology directly involved with the detection and interpretation of sensory stimuli is perception.

From experiments in perception, we have a good understanding of the sensitivity of the human organism to sensory signals and more important to cognitive psychology of the way we interpret sensory signals. 

iii) Pattern Recognition: Environmental stimuli rarely are perceived as single sensory events; they usually are perceived as part of a more meaningful pattern. The things we sense see, hear, feel, taste, or smell are almost always part of a complex pattern of sensory stimuli.

Think about the problem of reading. Reading is a complex effort in which the reader is required to form a meaningful pattern from an otherwise meaningless array of lines and curves.

iv) Attention: Although we are information-gathering creatures, it is evident that under normal circumstances we are also highly selective in the amount and type of information to which we attend. Our capacity to process information seems to be limited to two levels sensory and cognitive.

v) Consciousness: Consciousness is defined as “the current awareness, of external or internal circumstances.” Rejected as being “unscientific” by the behaviorists, the word consciousness and the concept it represents simply did not fade away. For most people, consciousness and unconscious thoughts (such as you might have on a first date) are very real. 

vi) Memory: Memory and perception work together. The information available to us comes from our perception, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Most obvious long-term storage is the knowledge of the language. We draw words from LTM and more or less use them correctly.

In a fleeting second, we are able to recall information about an event of years before. Such information does not come from an immediate perceptual experience; it is stored along with a vast number of other facts in the LTM.

vii) Representation of Knowledge: Fundamental of all human cognition is the representation of knowledge how information is symbolised and combined with the things stored in the brain. This part of cognition has two aspects: the conceptual representation of knowledge in mind and the way the brain stores and process information.

The conceptual representation in different individuals can be considerably different. In spite of these inherent dissimilarities between representations of knowledge, most humans do experience and depict experience in similar enough ways to get along well in the world.

viii) Cognitive Psychology Imagery: Cognitive psychologists are especially interested in the topic of internal representations of knowledge. The mental images of the environment are formed in the form of a cognitive map, a type of internal representation of the juxtaposed buildings, streets, street signs, spotlights, and so on. 

ix) Language: One form of knowledge shared by all human societies is the knowledge of language. Language is the principal means by which we acquire and express knowledge; thus, the study of how language is used is a central concern of cognitive psychology.

x) Developmental Psychology: Developmental psychology is another important area of cognitive psychology that has been intensely studied. Recent studies and theories in developmental cognitive psychology have greatly expanded our understanding of how cognitive structures develop.

As adults, we have all lived through childhood and adolescence and we share maturational experiences with all members of our

species.

xi) Thinking and Concept Formation: Thinking is the crown jewel of cognition. Thinking is the process by which a new mental representation is formed through the transformation of information.

Advances in cognitive psychology have led to a formidable arsenal of research techniques and theoretical models. An ability to think and form concepts is an important aspect of cognition.

xii) Human and Artificial Intelligence: Human intelligence includes the ability to acquire, recall, and use knowledge to understand concrete and abstract concepts and the relationships among objects and ideas, to understand a language, to follow instructions, to convert verbal descriptions into actions, and to behave according to the rules, and to use knowledge in a meaningful way.

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