Compare And Contrast The Two Approaches To The Study Of Cognitive Psychology

INTRODUCTION

The assignments aim is to discuss or expatiate the different approaches to the study of human cognition. In other to do this, the meaning of cognition first has to be established.

Cognition has to do with conscious mental activity. It involves the activity of thinking, learning, understanding, remembering, perception and judgement. It is the process of gaining knowledge and understanding through experience, thought and the senses. You can say cognition is the product of the process of thinking and reasoning.

In order to understand human cognition we have to apply Cognitive Psychology. This is because Cognitive Psychology is concerned with how we think. It is the study of human mental process and their function in thinking, feeling and human behaviour. Human mental processes such as memory, attention, perception, problem solving, language processing, creativity and thinking. Cognitive Psychology is the scientific exploration of human cognition which involves all our mental abilities. As a study, it focuses on how people process information and make judgements based on this information processed. It involves attempting to understand human cognition by observing the behaviour of people carrying out cognitive tasks. It is also concerned with the internal processes involved in making sense of the

The early cognitive psychologists where experimental cognitive psychologists that designed experiments to reveal the process involved in cognition. Experimental Cognitive Psychology involves the use of laboratory experiments to study behaviour. This just simply means that under this approach human cognition experiments are done under controlled laboratory conditions in order to obtain behavioural data. Under this approach the information processing approach was most widely adopted by cognitive psychologist to explain the process of human