Different Psychological Perspectives On Cognitive Processes

This book highlights some of the main lines of research in cognitive psychology in the Alps-Adria region, which, being geographically located in the centre of the European continent, encompasses eleven regions from six different countries: namely, Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Serbia and Slovenia. The reason for bringing together authors from different geographical areas and with different approaches to the broad discipline defined as Cognitive Science is detailed in the first section of this book, which outlines a brief history of psychology in each country in the region and provides an overview of the spirit that characterizes the Alps-Adria working community. The Alps-Adria Rector Conference “believes that harmonious coexistence and efficient collaboration of the peoples and communities of the different regions constitute the characteristics and specificities of the present cultural landscape of the Alps-Adria region in Europe.” It is in this spirit that this book has been edited, underscoring the concept of unity in diversity that has characterized the Alps-Adriatic community. Furthermore, such unity is now a necessary attribute for science, where interdisciplinarity is both highly encouraged and increasingly accepted. The second and third sections of the book are devoted to situating this interdisciplinarity in the framework of cognitive science. As such, this book will serve as a basis for fruitful exchange not only inside the community, but also beyond both geographical and theoretical borders.

Experts are persons who are very knowledgeable about or skillful in a particular area. The aim of this Research Topic is to advance knowledge in the understanding of the phenomenon of expertise by putting together different lines of research that directly or indirectly study expertise. Herbert Simon’s expertise studies initiated two lines of research. One is interested in elucidating the cognitive processes underlying expertise, and the other investigates how expertise develops. These lines of research started with studies comparing experts and novices in chess, and then they extended to numerous areas of expertise such as music, medical diagnosis, sports, arts and sciences. In the field of judgment and decision making researchers investigate the quality of judgments and decisions of experts in different professions (e.g., clinical psychologists, medical practitioners, judges, meteorologists, stock brokers). Those lines of research explicitly investigate the topic of expertise, but there are other research areas that make a substantial contribution to understanding expertise. Scholars in language acquisition and in face perception, for example, investigate cognitive processes and development of expertise in areas in which almost everyone becomes an expert. Furthermore, skill acquisition research informs in detail about short term cognitive changes that may be important to understand how expertise develops. We are interested in original research that advances knowledge in the understanding of decision making, cognitive processes and development of expertise in sports, intellectual games, arts, scientific disciplines and professions, as well as expertise in cognitive abilities such as perception, memory, attention, language and imagery. We are also interested in theoretical articles in any of these areas, articles that describe computational or mathematical models of expertise, and articles offering a framework that would guide expertise research. Articles that offer integrative approaches of some of the areas described above are strongly encouraged. The goal of this Research Topic is to produce a hallmark piece of work in the field of expertise, which complements and does not overlap with the “Neural implementations of expertise” Research Topic in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Psychology - Cognition, grade: 1, Egerton University, language: English, abstract: This essay will give an overview of the evolution of cognitive psychology. It will discuss the emergence of cognitive psychology and its interdisciplinary perspective. It will also assess the effects of the decline of behaviorism on the discipline of cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is one of the core branches of psychology that is concerned with the study of mental processes. It deals with mental processes involving the use of the brain in problem-solving, memory and language. Cognitive psychology attempts to explain the correlation between the biological functions of the brain and the human mind in understanding the ambient environment. As such, it explains how individuals diagnose life issues, understand and solve problems in the day-to-day lives through their mental processes, which plays the principal role of mediating between stimulus from the environment and the response. Ordinarily, human beings exhibit several psychological manifestations. For instance, people possess the thinking ability, which enables them to reason out on diverse aspects of life, and they are also able to remember past events in their lives. They also portray perception on new happenings in life in an attempt to construct a realistic way of reasoning to unravel mysterious phenomena. Moreover, human beings have the ability to learn new skills from their day-to-day experiences and keep the memory of different episodes. From a psychological perspective, these are all the works of cognition. Ideally, cognition refers to thinking, a mental process through which people learn; reason and solve problems. So cognitive psychologists focus on how human beings acquire information from the environment, especially in the form of a stimulus and process it through mental cognitive processes. The processed information is then stored to keep the memory of life events. Cognitive psychology tends to focus on biology more than psychology; thus, it shows a significant lack of the behaviorism aspect of classical psychology.

Our lives are informed by perceptual and cognitive processes at all levels, from instrumental learning to metaphorical discourse to memorial representation. Yet, historically, these two branches of experimental psychology, perception and cognition, have developed separately using independent methods of experimentation and analysis. This volume is motivated by the assumption that a fundamental integration of the two fields is fruitful methodologically and indispensable theoretically. It explores how the notion of psychophysics aligned with cognitive processes shapes the study of perception and cognition, and illuminates a variety of contemporary research issues from a novel theoretical perspective. The papers raise conceptual and metatheoretical issues against the background of relevant empirical data. The authors provide a virtually narrative account of the most recent developments in their respective fields of expertise in psychophysics and cognitive psychology. Hence, this volume gives the interested reader an opportunity to reflect critically upon some of the current issues defining the two domains and their conjunction. Topics discussed include the psychology and psychophysics of similarity, the psychophysics of visual memory and cognitive factors in judgment. The emerging notion of cognitive psychophysics may well warrant the attention of experts in the field.

To the vast majority of academic psychologists in the 1980s, the study of cognition referred to that area of psychology known as ‘cognitive psychology’. The major basis of this area had been the computer metaphor with its accompanying notion of the individual as an information-processing system. Yet within the field the study of cognition is much broader and has a history that reaches into antiquity, whereas ‘cognitive psychology’ as information-processing psychology had only recently become the standard bearer of cognitive studies. One of the purposes of this volume, originally published in 1986, was to articulate some of the fundamental distinctions between and concordances among different orientations concerning the study of cognition. The collection includes chapters on information processing, ecological, Gestalt, physiological, and operant psychology.

This book presents the contributions of the members of an Advanced Research Workshop on Cogni ti ve Science Perspectives on Emotion, Motivation and Cognition. The Workshop, funded mainly by the NATO Scientific Affairs Division, together with a contribution from the (British) Economic and Social Research Council, was conducted at II Ciocco, Tuscany, Italy, 21-27 June 1987. The venue for our discussions was ideal: a quiet holiday hotel, 500m high in the Apennine mountain range, approached by a mile of perilously steep, winding narrow road. The isolation was conducive to concentrated discussions on the topics of the Workshop. The reason for the Workshop was a felt need for researchers from disparate but related approaches to cognition, emotion, and motivation to communicate their perspectives and arguments to one another. To take just one example, the framework of information processing and the metaphor of mind as a computer has wrought a major revolution in psychological theories of cogni tion. That framework has radically altered the way psychologists conceptualize perception, memory, language, thought, and action. Those advances have formed the intellectual substrate for the "cognitive science" perspective on mental life.

Originally published in 1988, neuropsychology had evolved considerably in the decade prior to publication. Methods of research had changed, new topics of interests had emerged, and there had also been an ongoing debate as to the objectives of the field. This evolution had most radically affected the study of cognitive disorders – an area that had developed particularly rapidly in the years before and that ultimately became a field of inquiry in its own right, that of cognitive neuropsychology. The contributors to this volume all share a fascination with the new perspectives for understanding how the mind works that have arisen from the study of impaired cognition. Yet, and this was very characteristic of the state of the art in cognitive neuropsychology at the time, they disagreed on many important issues, even those pertaining to the most basic assumptions of their discipline. Therefore, the first part of this book is devoted to an attempt to define and clarify these basic issues and to the confrontation of alternative views. The remaining parts present original studies on several topics of particular interest in cognitive neuropsychology.

This book aims to highlight the vigour, diversity and insight of the various cognitive science perspectives on personality and emotion. It aims also to emphasise the rigorous scientific basis for research to be found in the integration of experimental psychology with neuroscience, connectionism and the new evolutionary psychology. The contributors to this book provide a wide-ranging survey of leading-edge research topics. It is divided into three parts, on general frameworks for cognitive science, on perspectives from emotion research, and on perspectives from studies of personality traits.