Cognitive
The cognitive approach began to revolutionise psychology in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, to become the dominant approach (i.e. perspective) in psychology by the late 1970s. Interest in mental processes had been gradually restored through the work of Piaget and Tolman. Other factors were important in the early development of the cognitive approach. For example, dissatisfaction with the behaviourist approach in its simple emphasis on behaviour rather than internal processes and the development of better experimental methods. But it was the arrival of the computer that gave cognitive psychology the terminology and metaphor it needed to investigate the human mind. The start of the use of computers allowed psychologists to try to understand the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with something simpler and better understood i.e. an artificial system such as a computer.Cognitive psychology became of great importance in the mid-1950s. Several factors were important in this: -
o Dissatisfaction with the behaviourist approach in its simple emphasis on external behaviour rather than internal processes
o The development of better experimental methods
o The start of the use of computers allowed psychologists to try to understand the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with something simpler and better understood i.e. an artificial system such as a computer.
They focus on the way humans process information, looking at how we treat information that comes in to the person (what behaviourists would call stimuli) and how this treatment leads to responses. In other words, they are interested in the variables that mediate between stimulus/input and response/output. Cognitive psychology assumes our behaviour is an internal process including perception, attention, language, memory and thought
The cognitive approach applies a nomothetic approach to discover human cognitive processes, but have also adopted idiographic techniques through using case studies
