Cognitive Psychology

Cognition is a term that groups together the mental processes of perceiving, recognizing, conceiving, judging, and reasoning. The cognitive psychology focuses on how people and animals as well, structure their experiences, how they make sense of them, and how they relate their current experiences to past ones that have been stored in memory. At any given moment we are bombarded by far more stimuli than we can possibly respond to. How do we filter this overwhelming input, put it into words or images, from hypotheses, and arrive at a perception of what is out there? Cognitive psychologists consider the learning process much more complex than the passive formation of the new stimulus-response associations. Even classical conditioning is viewed by cognitive psychologies as an active process by which organisms learn about relationships among events rather than as an automatic stamping in of associations between stimuli. Moreover, cognitive psychologies regard the learner as an active interpreter of the situation, with the learner’s past knowledge imposing a perceptual funnel on the experience. The learner fits new information into an organized network of already accumulated knowledge, often referred to as schema, or cognitive set. New information may fit the schema; if not, the learner reorganizes the schema to fit the information or construes the information in such a way as to fit the schema.