Explaining Human Behaviour

• Central to the cognitive view
• Try to make sense of their environment by imposing order and meaning on things we encounter
• Behaviours are based around the ways in information relevant to particular ways of acting
• Schemas - Ways of organising knowledge and experiences around the world - makes sense of objects, situations and people
• 2 main components:

  1. Dealing with information that we need to process (working memory)
  2. Storing all the information we get in the past and might need in the future (long-term memory)
• Components may be interconnected - current information may need to draw on past experiences
• One of the aims - clearly specify all the different information processing modules in the mind, features and relationships with each other