The Cognitive Perspective.

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The Cognitive Perspective

Cognitive psychology is the study of how people perform mental operations. The cognitive approach sees human beings as information processors that work in the same way as a computer. In humans, our brains are the hardware, receiving, interpreting and responding to information. Cognitive psychologists are only interested in studying mental activities and believe that the brain prefers organized information and the way we achieve this is by storing information about any one thing as a schema. This is a packet of organized information that is constantly updated according to new learning. Supporters of the cognitive perspective propose that once we know how the human brain works it will be possible to create a computer that behaves exactly the way a human would. This is called Artificial Intelligence; examples of this are computer games such as chess and card games.

Cognitive psychology focuses on mental functions such as memory and perception. George Miller (1956, cited in Hill 2001) investigated the capacity of the short-term memory. He referred to what he found as 'The magical number seven, plus or minus two'. In his study Miller found that by packaging information into larger units or 'chunks' the amount