Michael Pake

Cognitive psychology is the study of all things to do with thinking. It’s the part of psychology that covers perception, attention, memory, knowledge, thinking, reasoning, decision-making and language. To study it, cognitive psychologists develop ingenious experiments that manipulate a small part of the cognitive system.

Understanding long-term memory is essential in cognitive psychology. Long-term memory isn’t a unitary structure ‒ many different types of memory exist, which can independently be damaged due to brain injury. Research suggests the existence of the following different types of memory: Episodic memory: A conscious declarative (verbalisable) memory store for recent events that have occurred.

Short-term memory is memory for things currently in mind. It’s the active state of memory in cognitive psychology, like the RAM on a computer. According to the working memory model of British psychologists Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch, different types of short-term memory exist: Phonological loop: The inner ear.

Cognitive psychologists use the information processing model to explain cognition. This model assumes that human cognition is a lot like a computer and the way the human brain works is by processing information through a series of stages: Perception: Input stage. People need to encode information from the world in order to process it and then respond to it appropriately.

Humans are thinking animals and cognitive psychologists are aware that people make decisions all the time. These decisions can be trivial (what should I have as a snack?) or much more life-changing (should I marry my current boyfriend?). Humans don’t appear to be that rational and use a number of mental shortcuts (called heuristics) to help them make decisions (quite often badly): Availability heuristic: People make decisions based on how easy they find thinking of examples or outcomes, which leads to poor decisions if only certain information is easily available.

You can see executive function as being the central processor or managing director of the brain. Cognitive psychologists have theorised that the executive function system is a network that controls other areas of cognitive functioning, which is why some people call it cognitive control. It’s like a supervisory system overseeing all other functions, directing resources to the most appropriate cognition and inhibiting competing signals.

Cognitive psychology can provide insight in how people create new words. Language is a human form of communication ‒ it’s highly complex, creative, spontaneous and constantly changing. When people create new words, they usually do so in a consistent way such that new words fit with the grammatical structure. The following rules and findings apply to how new words and phrases (see figure for how to generate new insults!

Lying is a deliberate attempt to mislead someone verbally or by conveying a false impression through body language.Cognitive psychologists are particularly interested in lying, because it’s a special kind of thought process: unusually, it’s not designed to communicate truthfully with other people. Normal thought and communication is based on trying to provide accurate information (for example, a textbook wouldn’t be much good if it was designed not to tell the truth).