the cognitive approach

• The cognitive approach describes the scientific study of internal mental processes
• Cognitive psychologists study memory, perception and thinking, which are all private processes and so psychologists make inferences
• It considers the role of schema which is a mental framework of beliefs and expectations that influence cognitive processing and are developed from experiences
• Theoretical computer models are where the mind is compared to a computer
• theoretical computer models suggest the brain is a central processing unit and the concept of coding, which turns information into an accessible format and using stores to hold information, to make inferences about the mental processes that underlie behaviour
• cognitive neuroscience - the scientific study of how the brain’s structures influence mental processes
• mapping brain areas to specific cognitive functions has a long history in psychology e.g broca and wernicke's area in language
• cognitive neuroscience developed alongside the advances of brain imaging techniques such as fMRI and PET scans
• advances in brain imaging techniques have allowed scientists to systematically observe and describe the neurological basis of mental processes
• brain imaging techniques have been used in research involving tasks that require the use of episodic and semantic memory. Tulving et al showed how different LTM may be located on opposite sides of the prefrontal cortex
• cognitive neuroscience has led to the development of mind mapping techniques known as brain fingerprinting, which could be used analyse brain wave patterns in eyewitnesses to determine whether they are lying in court
• A strength is that the cognitive approach uses scientific and objective methods
• The approach is based on machine reductionism but humans are not like computers
• Many studies of the cognitive approach tend to use tasks that have little in common with pps’ everyday experiences and so lack external validity
• the cognitive approach has real life application e.g Loftus and Palmer demonstrated the unreliability of eyewitness testimonies, which has led to the development of the cognitive interview improving eyewitness accuracy
• The cognitive approach has also had important implications for the treatment of mental illnesses e.g CBT
• The cognitive approach is based on soft determinism, recognising that our cognitive systems can only operate within certain limits (determinism), but that we have an element of choice within those limits (soft) and are free to think before responding to a stimulus