Major Topics in Cognitive Psychology

• Perception

• Language

• Attention

• Memory

• Problem-Solving

• Decision-Making and Judgment

• Intelligence

PERCEPTION

Perception is our sensory experience of the world around us and involves both the recognition of environmental stimuli and actions in response to these stimuli. Through the perceptual process, we gain information about properties and elements of the environment that are critical to our survival. Perception not only creates our experience of the world around us; it allows us to act within our environment.

Perception includes the five senses; touch, sight, taste smell and taste. It also includes what is known as proprioception, a set of senses involving the ability to detect changes in body positions and movements. It also involves the cognitive processes required to process information, such as recognizing the face of a friend or detecting a familiar scent.

LANGUAGE

Language is the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and a language is a specific instance of such a system of complex communication. The scientific study of language in any of its senses is called linguistics. It is impossible to know precisely how many languages are in the world, and any number depends on a partly arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects, but estimates vary from around 5000 to 7000. Natural languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual or tactile stimuli, for example in graphic writing, braille, or whistling. This is because human language language is modality independent. When used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability that enables humans to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules.

ATTENTION

Attention is a concept studied in cognitive psychology that refers to how we actively process specific information present in our environment. As you are reading this, there are numerous sights, sounds and sensations going on around you – the pressure of your feet against the floor, the sight of the street out of a nearby window, the soft warmth of your shirt, the memory of a conversation you had earlier with a friend. How do we manage to experience all of these sensations and still focus on just one element of our environment?

According to psychologist and philosopher William James, attention "is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts…It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others."

Think of attention as a highlighter. As you read through a section of text in a book, the highlighted section stands out, causing you to focus your interest on that area. Attention allows you to "tune out" information, sensations and perceptions that are not relevant at the moment and instead focus your energy on the information that is important.

MEMORY

Have you ever wondered how you manage to remember information for a test? The ability to create new memories, store them for periods of time and recall them when they are needed allows us to learn and interact with the world around us. The study of human memory has been a subject of science and philosophy for thousands of years and has become one of the major topics of interest within cognitive psychology. But what exactly is memory? How are memories formed? The following overview offers a brief look at what memory is, how it works and how it is organized.

Memory refers to the processes that are used to acquire, store, retain and later retrieve information. There are three major processes involved in memory: encoding, storage and retrieval.

In order to form new memories, information must be changed into a usable form, which occurs through the process known as encoding. Once information has been successfully encoded, it must be stored in memory for later use. Much of this stored memory lies outside of our awareness most of the time, except when we actually need to use it. The retrieval process allows us to bring stored memories into conscious awareness.

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