cognitive approach

• Schema- are a key part of the cognitive approach. They are cognitive frameworks, mental models, patterns of thought and behaviour. They are mental short-cuts, ways of organising info and understanding the world.
• Examples of schema- self schema eg physical- 'im tall' and personality 'im kind' , stereotypes/generalisations eg 'dark alleys at night- dangerous' social roles, motor schema- eg how to walk, babies are born with schema to feed
• Cognitive neuroscience- the study of the relationship between brain activity and mental processes. it looks at the biological workings underlying cognition and so can be thought of as a mixture between the cognitive and biological approaches
• idea that behaviour can be directed by internal mental processes, internal mental processes such as attention, memory and decision making are private mental operations that cognitive psychologists study scientifically through lab experiments
• approach has scientific research support- Baddeley- dual task performance, these are highly controlled and replicable so tend to be reliable
• The approach has real world application. Theoretical

  models such as the WMM of memory can help explain

  behaviour of amnesiac patients such as K.F. This can help

  develop treatment.
• The findings of research into the approach lack ecological

  validity. There is a lack of mundane realism within memory

  tasks for example and the artificial environment which is

  used for research. This suggests the assumptions of the

  approach may not adequately explain the way people’s

  internal mental processes operate their everyday life.
• The approach suffers from machine reductionism. Reducing

  complex human behaviour by comparing it to a machine

  may be a weakness as computers do not forget things or

  have emotions like humans do. Therefore the cognitive

  approach is not a full account of human behaviour.
• the study of internal mental processes- are how information is processed in the mind, including all conscious and unconscious thoughts, typical areas for cognitive psychologists are attention, perception and memory
• an advantage of the cognitive approach is that it is a scientific approach with highly controlled experiments, for example many of the studies reporting the models of memory were conducted in a lab setting, with large sample sizes and used standardised materials, this means many of the claims cognitive psychologists make are backed up by evidence with high internal validity,
• however a drawback of this approach is that studying internal mental processes may be problematic- they cannot be directly observed, cognitive psychologists have to go beyond the research evidence and use inferences, this is making assumptions about the internal mental processes that produced the participant behaviour observed in an experiment,
• studying internal mental processes- making inferences- goes beyond research evidence and is potentially at risk to mistakes, however, inferences allow cognitive psychologists to explore areas innaccessible to other approaches, such as internal mental processes- including thinking, memory, problem-solving, attention and perception. Also, advances in neuroimaging have led to many inferences being supported by later brain activity studies
• schemas help us to engage with the world without being overwhelmed by sensory information, assigning objects to a schema (eg chair) means we do not have to consciously work out exactly what each object is individually.
• schemas help processing environmental information
• schemas allow us to predict the future- as schemas are based on previous experiences, they allow us to make assumptions about what objects and people will do in similar situations. these are often accurate as others act according to similar schemas.
• assumptions due to schemas can influence memory, a particular problem for EWT, people may feel they are remembering accurately however their recall has been altered by leading questions
• the computer model has been criticised for being overly simplistic- machine reductionist, critics argue the brain is significantly more complex
• theoretical models are flow chart representations of the steps of a specific mental process, eg the multistore model of memory which shows how sensory input, if not forgotten, processes short term memory to long term memory before its retrieved
• cognitive neuroscience aims to scientifically identify and examine the neurological structures and chemical processes in the brain that are linked to internal mental processes. By integrating the principles from both cognitive neuroscience and psychology, cognitive neuroscience seeks to understand how the brain's physical and chemical structure influences thoughts, memories, emotions and behaviours