The Importance of Cognitive Psychology 

Cognitive psychology looks at mental processes such as memory, problem solving, language use, attention, thinking, and creativity. Psychologists learn more about how these processes work every day. They can develop new ways of fighting potential memory problems and helping people improve their memories. There are so many areas that a cognitive psychologist could help a patient with, such as treating a psychological illness, helping perceptual or sensory issues, exploring treatments for brain trauma, and if the person is experiencing dementia, memory loss, or Alzheimer’s disease. Some topics that are included in cognitive psychology include, false memories, dreams, decision making, perception, attention span, and problem solving.

According to the article, “Remembering the Father of Cognitive Psychology”, “Ulric (Dick) Neisser was the “father of cognitive psychology” and an advocate for ecological approaches to cognitive research” (Hyman, 2012). Neisser's goal was to push psychology in the right direction. Neisser publicized “Cognitive Psychology” in 1967 and it brought together the research involving pattern recognition, perception, problem solving, attention, and remembering (Remembering the Father of Cognitive Psychology, Hyman, 2012). He always emphasized the importance of constructive processing and information processing. Neisser didn’t really believe in behaviorism because he believed that it limited what psychologists could learn and study about. He believed that research should be used to explore how people think, perceive, and remember in tasks and situations that reflect real world situations.

Cognitive psychology involves a lot of different topics, one being dreams. A dream is a sequence of images, primarily visual in quantity, which are experienced during sleep. A dream can have several scenes and characters that usually involve the dreamer. Although a dream is a hallucination, the dreamer feels like they are experiencing it. According to the article “A Cognitive Theory of Dreams”, If dreaming is defined as thinking that occurs during sleep, and if thinking consists essentially of generating ideas, then dreaming is also a process of conceiving and the resulting dream images may be viewed as the embodiment of conceptions” (Hall, 1953). A precognitive dream is dream that comes true in the future. A person's brain is active the whole time through a dream, it usually occurs during rem sleeping which is a very deep sleep that involves rapid eye movement.

Attention span is part of cognitive functioning and refers to a person’s ability to detect and focus on genral information and to pick important environmental information. Attention span is very important for human's behavior, it includes external processes like sound, image, and smell and it includes internal processes like thoughts. Attention is the cognitive and behavioral process of concentrating on important parts of information whether it is subjective or objective. Attention span is very important especially in children. It is a very important factor in their learning process. The amount of time a child spends listening and watching their teacher affects how much they have learned from the lesson which has a big impact on them when they are adults.

Cognitive psychology is the part of psychology that examines internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language. Cognitive psychologists are interested in how people understand, diagnose, and solve problems with their mental processes which lie between stimulus and response. As a scientific study of mind and mental functioning, the main focus of cognitive psychology is on studying how people obtain, process, and store information within the human brain. Cognitive psychologists are most concerned with studying how people remember, perceive, solve problems, focus, learn, forget, and think.    

Cite this page