Cognitive Psychology – the Study of Internal Psychological Processes

Cognition can be defined as a mental process or action of gaining knowledge as well as understanding through senses, thought and experience. Psychology is a diverse science which explores various issues that are related to our behavior as well as the mind. This discipline involves the immensity of challenges as well as the examination of individuals both individually and socially. Cognitive psychology is, therefore, the study of internal psychological processes including all things that gets to the brain such as learning, perception, problem solving, thinking, attention, memory as well as language (Sternberg, & Sternberg, 2016). Cognitive research is practically applied in the provision of help in the structuring educational curricula in order to enhance learning, ways to cope with mental disorders, treatment of learning disorders, increasing decision-making accuracy, enables the identification of ways in which people can recover from brain injury. This paper will try to address how research in cognitive psychology can be applied to issues in mental health.

These issues in which psychology tries to analyze are usually influenced by subjectivity which unavoidably leads people or individuals to study other individuals. Professionals of psychology frequently have problems reaching an agreement. The object of study in psychology is complex and changing. Psychologists mainly focus on making people understand themselves in a better way as well as improve their quality of life. However, their way of viewing things as well as their interests also influences decisions by psychologists despite their many efforts to seek the truth from different viewpoints or perspectives. Every person is usually different from the other and from each one's experiences, people are biased.

A good example is that people refer mental illness differently, some of the experts try to focus on biological causes of mental illness, others focus on the observable aspects of behavior while others think that the society is responsible for such cases. Cognitive psychology tries to understand mental processes which are related to knowledge. It is related to artificial intelligence as well as analyzing psychological processes such as learning, perception, cognitive distortions, memory as well as attention. The fact that studying cognitive processes is a difficult task has made it be rejected as a field of study in the past but today neuroscience has played a great role to ensuring that people approach or study cognitive process in a more tangible and scientific way. Through neuroimaging practices such as the Functional MRI, one has the ability to see how the brain of a person does specific tasks like deciding on whether you prefer tea or coffee.

Companies such as CogniFit are able to train as well as to measure the cognitive skills of an individual through specific games. These are skills and techniques that can be employed by a psychiatrist in the study, control, and treatment of mental illnesses in the society. Understanding how people process information, as well as think, allows psychologists to come up with new ways of helping individuals to deal with their psychological difficulties. By realizing that attention is both a limited as well as a selective resource, the psychologists are able to provide solutions which make it easier for individuals suffering from attentional difficulties to enhance their concentration as well as focus.

Cognitive psychology has enabled us to increase our understanding of how people recall, form and store memories. This understanding enables psychologists to come up with new ways of helping individuals to combat potential memory problems as well as in the improvement of their memories. Psychologists have discovered that the human short-term memory is really limited and short since it only lasts for 20-30 seconds and has the ability to hold between 5 to 9 items and because of this, strategies such as rehearsal may improve chances that data is transferable to a long-term memory that is more durable and more stable.

In day to day activities, people are exposed to a hypothetically boundless number of sensory experiences. No matter what one is doing, wherever one is, there are textures, tastes (if eating), multiple sights, smells as well as sounds that flood his/her brain and senses at any moment. The two separate systems in psychology are thought to be perception and sensation. Through the five human senses, a sensation is the bringing in of information. Perception involves how people's brain make sense of the information. According to psychologists, processing is a term used in referring to the way through which people's perception and sensation systems function both together and separately. Diagrams on central nervous system show that the brain is usually positioned on top of the sensory systems hence the higher-level cognitive processes for example thinking are usually considered to be based on top of the perception as well as sensation process (Anderson, 2014).

On the contrary, low-level brain structures such as those involved in hearing, sight as well as touch are at the bottom. Top-down processing is how people's brains utilize the information that is brought in the brain by the sensory systems. It is a cognitive process which pledges with people's thoughts that stream down to lower-level functions like the senses. Cognitive psychologists focus on mental processes which affect behavior some of these mental processes include attention which is a focused state of awareness on a subsection of the available perceptual data (Card, 2017). The function of attention is the identification or irrelevant data and filtering it out hence enabling important data or information to be disseminated to the other mental processes. Another example of mental processes is the memory which is classified into long-term and short-term memory.

Short-term memory is understood as working memory and cognitive psychologists frequently study reminiscence in terms of working memory. Working memory is the ability to remember data in the face of distraction. Long-term memory is divided into semantic memory, procedural memory, and episodic memory. Perception, metacognition, language are also other examples of mental processes. There have been theories of mental health that agrees with the important role that cognition plays, on the contrary, they differ by what process as well as how cognition influences mental health. Crafted by psychological analysts is basic for helping individuals who have encountered issues with mental processes. While we will in general take capacities, for example, consideration and critical thinking for in all actuality, maybe on the grounds that they are so woven into the texture of our regular presence, psychological interruptions can make devastation in various zones of a person's life. Consideration issues can make it hard to center at work or at school. Indeed, even moderately minor memory issues can make it a battle to deal with the requests of regular day to day existence.

Consider, for instance, how negative reasoning can meddle with your wellbeing and joy. We affair these contrary considerations occasionally, however, a few people may end up overpowered with negative reasoning examples that make it hard to work in day by day life. These ruminations can prompt expanded feelings of anxiety, cynicism, and self-disrupting, and can even add to sentiments of educated vulnerability. With the assistance of subjective clinicians, individuals are frequently ready to discover approaches to adapt and even overcome such difficulties (Linehan, 2018). Treatment medicines established in psychological research center around helping individuals change these negative reasoning examples and replace such cogitations with more positive and practical ones. 

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