The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to cognitive psychology:
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics, cybernetics, and applied psychology used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and into various other modern disciplines, such as cognitive science, linguistics, and economics.
What type of thing is cognitive psychology?
Cognitive psychology can be described as all of the following:
- A branch of science –
- One of the social sciences –
- One of the behavioral sciences –
- A branch of psychology –
- One of the social sciences –
- An academic discipline – subdivision of knowledge that is taught and researched at the college or university level.
Branches of cognitive psychology
Major research areas
- Categorization
- Induction and acquisition
- Judgement and classification
- Representation and structure
- Similarity
- Knowledge representation
- Language
- Memory
- Perception
- Thinking