Cognitive Approach

• The cognitive approach considers psychology to be the study of the internal mental processes
• Schema - mental representations of knowledge and experience that are stored in memory and used to make sense of new information . Simply put, a schema describes patterns of thinking and behaviour that people use to interpret the world
• Cognitive neuroscience aims to relate mental processes to brain structure, and combines thinking and biological structures. It uses scanning techniques to gather data and uses neurotypical individuals to locate the physical basis of cognitive processes in the brain
• The cognitive approach does use scientific methods when testing theoretical and computer models, and brain scanning techniques within cognitive neuroscience which allows for replicability and lends the research more generalisability, particularly when the samples are larger
• The Cognitive approach uses inference which is not objective and could be seen as a 'leap to far' in explaining thinking. Therefore, this makes the cognitive approach non-scientific