Psych102 Unit 1

Charlotte Buckhold
Unit 1 Individual Project
PSYC102-1503B-02
August 19, 2015

Cognitive Psychology is the study of mental processes, going beyond the “conscious” and “unconscious” of psychodynamic psychology, delving into the studies of sensation, perception, problem solving, attention, memory, learning and intelligence. Cognitive psychology was born from the dissatisfaction of behavioral psychology, which focuses on the studies of people’s observable behaviors as opposed to ones internal process. Some of the key concepts of cognitive psychology are perception, memory and language. Perception is how someone identifies, interprets and responds to sensory information (i.e. information gathered from our senses). Memory is a person’s ability to record and store information. Last but not least is language, a method of either spoken or written communication. Alfred Binet (1857 - 1911) was a French researcher who researched the mental capacity of humans. He

According to Piaget there are four stages of intelligence. They are as follows: the Sensorimotor stage from birth to 2 years of age. In this stage Piaget states that the child is able to objects and stimuli but lack an internal representation of the outside world. The Preoperational stage from ages two to seven in which the child is able to use language to communicate, they also have the ability to think in images and draw those images. The Concrete Operational stage from ages seven - eleven is where the child should be using logical reasoning and is able to think in multiple dimensions. The last stage is the Formal Operational stage, which lasts from age eleven to adulthood. In this phase the child/adult has the increased ability to have idealistic, logical and abstract thoughts. Piaget also developed the idea of a schema. A schema is how people organize the information they gather into smaller