Introduction

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and thinking. We will study all of these domains and examine unique case studies that allow us to dig deeper!

The origin of cognitive psychology occurred in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which had held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside of the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics as well as applied psychology used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Such research became possible due to the advances in technology that allowed for the measurement of brain activity.

The term “cognition” stems from the Latin word “ cognoscere” or “to know”. Fundamentally, cognitive psychology studies how people acquire and apply knowledge or information. It is closely related to the highly interdisciplinary cognitive science and influenced by artificial intelligence, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, biology, physics, and neuroscience.