Cognitive psychology

Cognitive Psychology: The study of reasoning, thinking, language use, judgment and decision-making in adults and children. Research in this area includes studies of attention, memory, and visual and auditory information processing.

Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember, and learn. As part of the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics.

The core focus of cognitive psychology is on how people acquire, process and store information. There are numerous practical applications for cognitive research, such as improving memory, increasing decision-making accuracy, and structuring educational curricula to enhance learning.

Until the 1950s, behaviorism was the dominant school of thought in psychology. Between 1950 and 1970, the tide began to shift against behavioral psychology to focus on topics such as attention, memory and problem-solving. Often referred to as the cognitive revolution, this period generated considerable research on topics including processing models, cognitive research methods and the first use of the term "cognitive psychology."

The term "cognitive psychology" was first used in 1967 by American psychologist Ulric Neisser in his book Cognitive Psychology. According to Neisser, cognition involves "all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations. Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon."

Cognitive Neuroscience: The study of cognitive processes and their implementation in the brain. Cognitive neuroscientists use methods drawn from brain damage, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, functional neuroimaging, and computer modeling.

Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by neural circuits in the brain.

Cognitive neuroscience aims to understand how complex mental functions such as perception, memory, language and emotion are implemented within the brain. A key factor in the development of this new discipline has been technological advances in methods for non-invasive brain imaging which allow scientists to study the relationship between brain activity and cognitive mechanisms in awake, behaving, human subjects.