Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is one of the most popular aspects of foreign scientific psychology. If we talk about the literal translation of its name, it means "cognitive". It originated in the 60s of XX century in the USA and acted as the opposite of behaviorism.

The cognitive direction studies how a person receives, realizes information about the world around him, as it seems to him, is stored in his memory, transformed into knowledge and, finally, how the acquired skills in his psychology influence personal behavior, attention. This direction encompasses many cognitive processes: beginning with sensations, recognizing the images surrounding each of us and ending with memory, forming thinking, certain representations.

The Revolution of Foreign Psychology

This is sometimes called this, rather new, psychological direction. There are weighty arguments for this. So, since the 20-ies of the XX century, few of the scientific intelligentsia studied the perception, thinking, representation, etc. Psychologists of the United States at that time have forgotten about it. In turn, the founder of behaviorism Watson considered it inappropriate to use the above terms, and representatives of psychoanalysis were engaged in researching the needs, motivations, instincts of man. As a result, many researchers took the appearance of such a new branch in psychology with great enthusiasm and enthusiasm, which led to an increase in discoveries in this field.

Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology

They were developed by the American psychologist Bek, the organizer of the Center for Cognitive Psychotherapy, located in the University of Pennsylvania. It is considered that this direction perceives man as a system engaged in the continuous search for information about all those subjects, events that make up its surrounding world. The information received by each individual is processed step by step through various regulatory processes (attention, repetition and consolidation of the received data in their minds).

Memory in Cognitive Psychology

Human memory is compared with computer memory. It is important to note that her research has yielded far more results for several years than for the whole previous one before this period. In connection with this, a "computer metaphor" was adopted, which brings a number of related properties between the memory of a person and a computer. So, memory, as well as thinking in cognitive psychology, is perceived as an important aspect of the whole process of processing any information. Cognitivists set a goal to learn how this information, obtained from episodic memory, goes into basic knowledge.

The American psychologist Naisser believed that sensory memory (lasting about 25 seconds and representing the preservation of the images obtained in the form of sensory influences) is first processed in peripheral types of memory. Further, it falls into a verbal short-term (here, the information about events is processed and stored), and then goes on to long-term memorization (but only after careful, sequential processing).

Humanistic and Cognitive Psychology

Humanistic, like cognitive psychology, has emerged, as opposed to behaviourist teachings and psychoanalysis. The subject of its study is a healthy creative person whose goal is self-actualization. A clear representative of this trend is Maslow. He believed that the main source of activity of each person is his continuous desire for self-expression.