Cognitive processing

• Some people may not have the financial resources to afford better quality food, so they rationalize the decision to keep buying unhealthy options.
• Cognitive processing is the process by which people think about mathematical problems, plan their next holiday, retell a joke they have heard, or decide which car to buy.
• Cognitive psychologists are involved in finding out how the human mind comes to know things about the world and how it uses this knowledge.
• The cognitive approach developed around the 1950s as a result of increasing dissatisfaction with Behaviourism, which was the dominant school of scientific psychology.
• Behaviorists, such as B. F. Skinner, argued that only behavior that could be observed should be studied and that the mind was a "black box" - that is, the processes that take place within the mind cannot be studied.
• Cognitive psychologists argued that scientific psychology should include research on mental processes and how humans process information and create meaning.
• According to cognitive psychologists, the mind can be conceptualized as a set of mental processes that are carried out by the brain.
• These mental processes include perception, thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, memory, language, and attention.
• The concept of cognition refers to such processes.
• Cognition is also related to one's personal experience.
• As we interact with the world around us, we create mental representations - that is, conceptual understandings of how the world works.
• Motivation refers to the lack of motivation to understand the ingredients.
• Since people have different experiences, they have different mental representations - for example, of what is right or wrong, or about what boys and girls can and cannot do.
• Maybe his past experience has been a lot of feedback that he is a poor writer.
• Cognitive psychologists have used the experimental method because it was assumed to be the most scientific method.
• The assumption of mental representations guiding behavior plays a key role in understanding all types of behavior.
• Knowledge refers to the difficulty of understanding the ingredients on food labels.
• A student might keep procrastinating when he should be writing his extended essay.
• Mental representations guide behavior.
• This could be explained by his past experience.
• We process new information through the filter of past experience and understanding.
• This then determines how we attend to, perceive, and remember new information.
• Maybe his past experience has been that when he has done things last minute, he seems to get better grades.
• The experimental tasks did not always resemble what people did in their daily lives.
• Because of this, he wants to avoid the task in order to avoid further failure.
• Cognitive psychologists believe that mental processes can, to some extent, be studied scientifically.
• Three factors contribute to this decision-making process: knowledge, motivation, and economy.
• Cognitive psychologists recognize that we are bombarded with information in our environment every day.
• Cognitive psychologists now study cognition in the laboratory as well as in a daily context.
• Fiske and Taylor (1991) argue that we are cognitive misers - that is, we often make the choice not to actively process information because we want to save time and effort.
• Ulric Neisser was one of the first to argue that cognitive psychology had become too artificial and that researchers should not forget that cognition cannot be isolated from our everyday experiences.
• Economy refers to the time and effort required to understand the ingredients.
• The way that we process and organize our information determines how we behave.
• One assumption of the cognitive approach is that we are information processors.
• John von Neumann's book The Computer and the Brain gave psychologists a metaphor for explaining cognitive processes.
• Cognitive psychologists see the mind as an information-processing machine using hardware (the brain) and software (mental representations).
• The "input" is sensory information that comes to us through our interaction with the environment, referred to as bottom-up processing.
• Information is then processed in the mind by top-down processing via pre-stored information in memory.
• There is some output in the form of behavior.
• A second assumption of the cognitive approach is that cognitive processes can be studied scientifically by scientific research methods.