Cognitive Psychology: Mental Processes and Information Theory

Cognitive Psychology: Core Concepts

Cognitive psychology is a school of psychology that deals with the study of cognition and the mental processes involved in knowledge, including perception, memory, learning, as well as the formation of concepts and logical reasoning.

For cognitive psychology, the mechanisms responsible for cognitive thought processes involve actions such as storing, retrieving, recognizing, and using information received through the senses. This field emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a reaction to behaviorism.

Previously, the direct investigation of mental processes was vetoed due to the inability to approach the mind through a scientific method that required phenomena to be described operationally. In contrast to behaviorism, cognitive psychology uses mental processes to explain human behavior—processes that go beyond simple stimulus-response reactions.

The Cognitivist Hypothesis

Despite the different schools and disciplines that constitute the cognitive sciences, they all share a common view: behavior must be explained by reference to a series of structures and mental processes, understood as forms of organization and information processing.

Noam Chomsky's work on language problems showed that behaviorism had to address a fundamental issue: explaining the origin of language. As Chomsky demonstrated, language processes cannot be reduced to simple stimulus-reinforcement. The study of language demanded that we once again take account of the mind and mental processes—what he called the "black box."

Information Processing and the Computer Metaphor

The idea was to postulate the existence of an information-processing mechanism to serve as an intermediary between linguistic stimuli and the response generated by the individual. Cognitive psychology is associated with the paradigm of information processing through the manipulation of symbols and the computer metaphor, which considers the human mind as a system consisting of:

• Software: The mental processes themselves.
• Hardware: The physical structures where mental processes are implemented.

This hypothesis implied a sequential and localized form of cognition. However, such approaches are inconsistent with the most recent results of neuroscience research. Modern, more acceptable brain models suggest that operations are generally distributed and rely on massive interconnections, which are constantly changing as a product of experience.