Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as "attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and thinking". (Source: APA, 2013)

Although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view.
- Ulric Neisser, 1967

CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes

Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

• Man knows much more than he understands.
  • Alfred Adler, quoted in Harold H. Mosak and Michael P. Maniacci. A Primer of Adlerian Psychology: The Analytic-Behavioural-Cognitive Psychology of Alfred Adler (1999)

• Cognition Processes of knowing, including attending, remembering, and reasoning; also the content of the processes, such as concepts and memories.

Cognitive appraisal With respect to emotions, the process through which physiological arousal is interpreted with respect to circumstances in the particular setting in which it is being experienced...

Cognitive appraisal theory of emotion A theory stating [about]... the experience of emotion ..

Cognitive behavior modification A therapeutic approach that combines the cognitive emphasis on the role of thoughts and attitudes influencing motivations and response...

Cognitive development The development of processes of knowing, including imagining, perceiving, reasoning, and problem solving.

Cognitive dissonance The theory that the tension-producing effects of incongruous cognitions motivate individuals to reduce such tension.

Cognitive map A mental representation of physical space.

Cognitive perspective The perspective on psychology that stresses human thought and the processes of knowing, such as attending, thinking, remembering, expecting, solving problems, fantasizing, and consciousness.

Cognitive processes Higher mental processes, such as perception, memory, language, problem solving, and abstract thinking.

Cognitive psychology The study of higher mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, and thinking.

Cognitive science The interdisciplinary field of study of the approach systems and processes that manipulate information.

Cognitive therapy A type of psychotherapeutic treatment that attempts to change feelings and behaviors by changing the way a client thinks about or perceives significant life experiences.

• American Psychological Association APA (2013). "Glossary of psychological terms," at Apa.org. Retrieved 08-2016.

• Glucose is the main energy fuel supporting the brain's functions and the ingestion of even small doses can improve cognitive functioning... The authors conclude that older adults' preference for positive information is so potent that it can guide the way energy resources are used to support goals relating to positivity. The study is the first to demonstrate that a simple dietary intervention — providing a small dose of glucose — can help older adults retain their positivity even when faced with challenging task conditions.
  • Food for Happy Thought: Glucose Helps Older Adults Retain a Positive Mindset American Psychological Association Journal, Psychology and Aging (20 September 2017)

• Locke’s importance to psychology needs to be re-examined in the light of changing developments. He is not merely to be seen as the father of cognitive psychology – although, as a later chapter will suggest, he was a father who to a certain extent concealed his own ancestry. Locke was also the step-father to a rebellious son, who reacted against those very parts of his work that today seem modern. As such, Locke is a step-grandfather of critical psychology, occupying an interesting place in the story of critical psychology’s hidden roots.
  • Michael Billig (2008), The Hidden Roots of Critical Psychology, p. 28-29

• Here I was, sitting with the boys of the first team in cognitive psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology [at Stanford and Harvard], and in the midst of this I felt here were men and women who, themselves were not highly evolved beings. Their own lives were not fulfilled.
  • Ram Dass, Be Here Now (1971)

• Friedrich Hayek … seems to have been the first to postulate what is the core of this paper, namely, the idea of memory and perception represented in widely distributed networks of interconnected cortical cells. Subsequently this idea has received theoretical support, however tangential, from the fields of cognitive psychology, connectionism and artificial intelligence. Empirically, it is well supported by the physiological study and neuroimaging of working memory.
  • Joaquin Fuster, "Network Memory", Trends in Neuroscience, Vol. 20, No. 10 (October 1997), 451

M - R

• The semi-metaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social.
  • Margaret Mead, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), p. 696, as cited in Social Cognitive Psychology: History and Current Domains (1997), David F. Barone, James E. Maddux, Charles R. Snyder . p. 20

• The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations. ... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts.
  • Ulric Neisser. (1967). Cognitive Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 4.

• I've called Daniel Kahneman the world's most influential living psychologist and I believe that is true. He pretty much created the field of behavioural economics and has revolutionised large parts of cognitive psychology and social psychology. His central message could not be more important, namely, that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That's a powerful and important discovery.
  • Steven Pinker. "Daniel Kahneman changed the way we think about thinking. But what do other thinkers think of him?," in The Observer, 16 February 2014.

S - Z

• There is probably no more abused a term in the history of philosophy than “representation,” and my use of this term differs both from its use in traditional philosophy and from its use in contemporary cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.... The sense of “representation” in question is meant to be entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts: the sense of “represent” in which a belief represents its conditions of satisfaction is the same sense in which a statement represents its conditions of satisfaction. To say that a belief is a representation is simply to say that it has a propositional content and a psychological mode.
  • John Searle (1983) Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. p. 12

• Cognitive introspective psychology and related cognitive science can no longer be ignored experimentally, or written off as "a science of epiphenomena", nor either as something that must, in principle, reduce eventually to neurophysiology. The events of inner experience, as emergent properties of brain processes, become themselves explanatory causal constructs in their own right, interacting at their own level with their own laws and dynamics. The whole world of inner experience (the world of the humanities) long rejected by 20th century scientific materialism, thus becomes recognized and included within the domain of science.
  • Roger Wolcott Sperry, "Some Effects of Disconnecting the Cerebral Hemispheres," Nobel lecture 8 December 1981.

See also

• Cognition
• Cognitive science
• Mental process
• Neuroscience
• Psychology