AO3 Cognitive Approach

• The cognitive approach uses scientific and objective methods. The emergence of cognitive neuroscience has substantially increased the scientific credibility of psychology. This is due to the emphasis on objectively collecting reliable data through direct observation of the neural processes underlying cognition, as seen in PET, CT, MRI and fMRI scans.
• A weakness of the cognitive approach is that it uses 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.
• The cognitive approach is considered machine reductionist


  Although there are similarity between the human mind and the operations of a computer, machine reductionism ignores the influence of human emotion and motivation on the cognitive system, and how this affects our ability to process information
• The cognitive approach is soft deterministic as it sees humans as being able to reason and make conscious decision within the limits of what they know or their ‘cognitive system’. This is a more reasonable ‘interactionist’ position that the hard determinism suggested by other approaches