Cognitive Psychology

         The cognitive approach may legitimately be applied to other traditional subdivisions within psychology. With respect to developmental psychology, for example, we can ask questions regarding how cognitive processes change, for better or for worse, with ageing. We can also ask how cognitive representations of the world develop during childhood and how this relates to children's behaviour and abilities. Indeed, the approach of Piaget, one of the founders of developmental psychology as we know it today, was very much in the spirit of modern cognitive psychology. In social psychology, topics such as social interaction, attitude formation, and belief systems, to name but a few, are often approached from an information-processing perspective.     Recently, ideas from mainstream cognitive psychology have been applied with considerable success in attempts to understand the traditional subject matter of abnormal psychology, such as anxiety and depression. It has been shown, for example, that anxiety and depression both influence cognitive processing but in surprisingly different ways. It is appropriate at this point, however, to emphasize that many clinicians who refer to themselves as cognitive therapists actually do very little that corresponds in any way to the activities of mainstream experimental cognitive psychologists. This is an example of the vagueness, referred to earlier, of the term cognitive.

            The relationship between cognitive psychology and neuropsychology is so important that it merits special mention. In recent years, the relationship between the two has led to the establishment of the field of cognitive neuropsychology. Alongside human experimental psychology and artificial intelligence, cognitive neuropsychology is one of the three main approaches to cognition. Cognitive neuropsychology is concerned with the patterns of normal and impaired functioning in brain-damaged patients. This can provide an extremely useful way to test cognitive theories. One of the most fruitful examples of this approach is in terms of cognitive models of reading and writing. By studying the particular pattern of errors made by a brain-damaged patient and contrasting it with the patterns of errors made by other patients, the validity of different models of reading and writing can be tested. It is assumed, for example, that different routes exist for translating written words into speech. Some brain-damaged patients seem able to read only by translating each letter into its corresponding sound. These patients have great difficulty reading orthographically irregular words such as yacht. Others seem to have the ability to read only via whole word recognition, and they have great difficulty reading simple non-words such as bink, because they cannot translate letters into sounds. Such observations offer clear support for the existence of more than one route from the printed to the spoken word.