cognitive evaluation

• real life application

  cognitive development - piaget's proposal of stages of cognitive development reflecting the sophistication of a child's thinking, sees a child's mind as a computer that gradually develops in processing ability

  mood disorders - ellis believes emotional and behavioural disorders develop because of irrational thoughts and beliefs

  memory - memory models have allowed us to understand cognitive processes further
• scientific and objective methods

  cognitive approach employs methods of study to enable researchers to infer cognitive processes involving the use of lab experiments to produce reliable, objective data
• external validity

  cognitive psychs can only infer about mental processes from behaviour that they observe

  -ve is that suffers from being too abstract and theoretical and experimental studies on cognitive processes carried out using artificial stimuli do not represent real life
• soft determinism

  recognises that our cognitive system can only operate within limits of what we know, but we are free to think before responding to a stimulus

  interactionist approach, rather than hard determinism suggested by other approaches
• machine reductionism

  computer analogy has been criticised for this: ignores the influence of emotion and motivation on the cognitive system and how this affects our ability to process information

  e.g. human memory can be affected by emotional factors