Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the psychological science which studies cognition, the mental processes that are hypothesised to underlie behavior. This covers a broad range of research domains, examining questions about the workings of memory, attention, perception, knowledge representation, reasoning, creativity and problem solving. The term came into use with the publication of the book Cognitive Psychology by Ulric Neisser in 1967. There he gives a very broad definition of cognitive psychology, emphasising that it is a point of view which postulates the mind as having a certain conceptual structure, thus giving the discipline scope to study more than the higher-level concepts such as "reasoning" that modern books often enumerate in an attempt to give a definition. Neisser's definition of cognition illustrates this well:

Major research areas in cognitive psychology

Perception

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• Attention and Filter theories (the ability to focus mental effort on specific stimuli while excluding other stimuli from consideration)
• Pattern recognition (the ability to correctly interpret ambiguous sensory information)

Memory

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• Short-term memory and long-term memory
• Autobiographical memory
• Episodic memory
• Flashbulb memory
• Semantic memory
• Constructive memory
• Encoding, storing and retrieving memory-based information

Knowledge representation

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• Mental imagery
• Propositional encoding
• Imagery versus proposition debate
• Dual-coding theories
• Mental models

Language

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• Grammar and linguistics
• Phonetics and phonology
• Language acquisition

Thinking

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• Logic, formal and natural reasoning
• Concept formation
• Problem solving
• Judgment and decision making