“What is cognitive psychology?” is one of the most common question asked in the field of psychology. In the beginning, psychology was a subject to assimilate the different behaviors of people and trying to comprehend what is the root cause of it. Though the psychology only revolved around the behaviors of the people and so in a grand shift cognitive psychology entered into the picture. Cognitive psychology deals with mental processed and complex behaviors.
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the brain or mind and the processing occurring inside it which includes memory, thinking, perception and critical thinking, etc. While the psychologist thought that the study of external behaviors is important they also thought the study of internal behaviors necessary as well and to link them together to understand human practices.
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY RELEVANCE WITH COMPUTER:
It is said by many psychologists that a human brain process works analogously to that of a computer. Primarily Herbert Simon was the person who figured that the computer processing system is quite similar to the human mind system. He said that our brain functions exactly like a computer’s hardware while our mind is like a computer’s software.
In the 1950s, the development in the field of the computer also helped bring the importance of cognitive psychology to light. Psychologists used computer processes as a metaphor to explain brain activity. It shows that a human mind is a processor of information; it receives the information from outside, follows the steps coded in the brain, and produces an output. All of this is the result of neural networks in our brains.
INFORMATION PROCESSING IN HUMAN MIND:
It is to be assumed by many psychologists that there is a series of steps that our brain goes through in order to process data and give output. The processes take place in the following way for example the human eye sees a flying creature with wings. It is the input or visual information. To understand what this creature is this information is coded into neural activity. The brain makes new neural pathways or neural connections through which the data is stored or coded. This coded information then helps to give the output which will be the human recognizing that living species with wings as “bird”.
LIMIT OF INFORMATION PROCESSING:
When psychologists got into the depth of the internal processes some questions ■■■■■■■ for example can the brain focus on more than one task at a time? Or how can the brain focus on one thing and if required, divert its attention to the other task in the nick of time?
The researchers found that when the brain tries to focus on two things at once it divides and tries to distribute the gray matter to each task equally but is not able to perform tasks efficiently. Research shows that the brain cannot perform more than two tasks simultaneously since there are two hemispheres present that manage the tasks.
Even if the brain is able to give its divided attention to two tasks at a time it still reduces the efficiency of the performance because it is out of the capacity of the brain. There could be certain arguments against this statement. For example, some people are good at doing work while eating food. One reason could be that the practice of the motor skills enables the person to perform two tasks simultaneously and does not overlap with the other complex processes.
MEASUREMENT OF BRAIN ACTIVITY:
Brain activity can be measured by certain methods which are as follows:
- EEG (Electroencephalography): It is considered to be the second-best method to determine brain activity it uses small metal discs that are attached to the scalp near the eyes and forehead to detect the electrical activity in the brain.
- fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging): It detects changes in the blood flow in response to neural activity. For the brain to be active it requires oxygen and so to get the required oxygen the blood flow increases which make it clear in fMRI that a certain part of the brain is active.
- ECoG (Electrocorticography): It is similar to how EEG works but it measures the combined neural activity. It requires the metal electrodes to be inserted under the scalp and so surgery has to be done which can be risky.
CONCLUSION:
Cognitive psychology has itself taken a stream and is now implied to sociological perspectives as well. When studying this particular topic a whole new world of research opportunity was born in which researchers were able to see the learning as it happened and see memories being coded or recalled. With technological developments, we are able to explore the internal neural wiring. Our whole human body will not function well if there is a hindrance to the activity of the brain. However, the methods above used to measure brain activity are not really precise. We are still not able to get detailed data on neuron activity. This might improve from time to time with technological developments.