COGNITIVE APPROACH

• Cognitive approach


  Focuses on how our mental processes affect behaviour, developed due to behaviourists' failure to acknowledge mental processes
• Internal mental process


  Private operation of mind such as perception or attention that mediates between stimulus and response
• Inference


  A process of studying mental processes indirectly by observing people's behaviour and drawing conclusions based on it
• Schemas


  • Mental framework of beliefs and expectations developed from experience, start off basic but get more complex as we absorb more knowledge and gain more experience
  • Useful - process more information quicker so reduces cognitive load
  • Not useful - may distort the interpretation of sensory information that may lead to stereotypes, and we may make errors of judgement
• Theoretical model


  Information processing approach, suggests information flows through the human cognitive system in stages e.g. input, storage, retrieval, like a computer
• Computer model


  Tries to draw similarities between the way information is processed in the brain and in a computer in the way that they both produce similar results
• Cognitive neuroscience


  Scientific study of the influence of brain structures on mental processes
• Brain scanning techniques


  • FMRI, PET scans
• The left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for speech and the right responsible for recognising faces
• Real world application of cognitive neuroscience


  • Understanding of memory
  • Mental health treatments in devising medicines to target affected areas
  • Brain fingerprinting in witness statements to test for the truth
• Strengths of cognitive neuroscience


  • Scientific - objective methods (brain scans)
  • Real world application
• Weaknesses of cognitive neuroscience


  • Deterministic - no free will - every mental process has a cause in the brain
  • Experiments in the lab - doesn't replicate brain activity in real life
• Strengths of the cognitive approach


  • Objective scientific methods - highly controlled lab experiments which produces reliable, objective data, enhancing the scientific basis of human behaviour
  • Real life application - most dominant approach - AI and robots are a huge advancement changing how we live as well as the improved mental health treatments and eyewitness testimonies
  • Soft determinism - mental processes are determined by certain internal and external factors, but we also exert some free will at times
• Weaknesses of the cognitive approach


  • Machine reductionist - ignores the influence of human emotion and focuses too much on comparing human behaviour to machines
  • Too abstract and theoretical - only able to make inferences from mental processes and study them indirectly, lab experiments use artificial stimuli which is not representative of real life therefore lacking external validity