AO3

• Soft Determinism = The cognitive approach sees humans as being able to reason and make conscious decisions within the limits of what they know or their ‘cognitive system’, and so adopts a soft deterministic approach. This is more flexible than the behaviourist hard determinism stance because it allows for humans to have some conscious insight into their behaviour: a complexity which differentiates us from animals, and so provides a better explanation for human behaviour than behaviourism.
• Overly-Abstract Concepts = Cognitive psychology makes extensive use of schemas and analogies as ways of indirectly studying and inferring the cognitive basis of behaviour. However, this reliance of inference means that some ideas in cognitive psychology may seem too abstract and not have enough supporting empirical evidence of such mechanisms being observed. Therefore, this reduces the potential practical applications of cognitive research, as it remains mainly theoretical.