Definition of Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology takes on a very different approach than that of other schools of thought in the field of psychology. Cognitive psychology is more accepting of the scientific method and looking inward with an individual as a valid method of investigation. Introspection is a report on the self observation of an individual's conscious thoughts, sensations, and desires. Another aspect of the differences in cognitive psychology is the different ways that the existence of internal mental states such as beliefs, ideas, wants, and motivations. Cognitive psychology has been defined as the study of the mental processes and how an individual thinks, perceives, remembers, and learns from their experiences. Other aspects of cognitive psychology are; neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics. The core of cognitive psychology is figuring out the way that an individual acquires, processes, and stores learned information (Willingham, 2007).

Many popular philosophers and psychologists are able to be traced all the way back to Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt is credited with founding the first research lab in 1879. Wundt took the necessary steps in having cognitive psychology considered to be a legitimate science and wrote several journals, educated students in the field, composed educational textbooks, and petitioned other universities to implement psychology into their regular curriculum. (Willingham, 2007). A man by the name of William James wrote a textbook called "The Principles of Psychology" in 1890. This book was later revised to an abridged version called "Psychology: The Briefer Course" in 1892. James was not in agreeance with the beliefs within structuralism which focused on introspection and the breaking down of most mental events to smaller elements. James tendencies focused on the whole event and then took into account the environment of the projected behavior. He is most renowned for the James-Lange Theory of emotion which states that an event of some type has the ability to trigger a reaction that the individual then interprets. Therefore it is the processed interpretation that has cause an emotion (Cherry, 2010).

Jean Piaget created a milestone study on the way that a child is able to process information as well as to progress in knowledge. Paiget discovered that by repeating a process of learning the child is able to learn a new level of intelligence through repetition. (Atherton, 2011).

Noam Chomsky addressed his own theories on linguistics. He disagreed with Skinner's ideas concerning linguistics due to the fact that he had performed experiments on animals and therefore assumed that humans would have the same reactions. Chomsky was convinced that these studies were not able to explain how children could use intelligent sentences randomly in the correct context. He proposed that "If behaviorism can't account for language...who knows how else it will fail"