Meaning and Nature of Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember and learn. As part of the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy and linguistics. 

The core focus of cognitive psychology is on how people acquire, process and store information. There are numerous practical applications for cognitive research, such as improving memory, increasing decision-making accuracy and structuring educational curricula to enhance learning. 

Nature of Cognitive Psychology 

The Nature of cognitive psychology could be understood by understanding the areas which it covers in it. 

1. Perception: It is the Process of understanding or giving meaning to the sensation we come across. 

2. Attention: It is a process through which we focus on incoming information. The ability of attention is flexible and diversion of attention always occurs very quickly.

3. Working Memory: This could be defined as a process which helps us to understand the facts and figures of the world by performing a sort of mental juggling act, such as by repeating the information ourselves or by jolting it down such that it could be remembered. It is known as STM. 

4. Identifying and Classifying Objects: These are very important cognitive process in which we engaged ourselves in identifying and classifying the material we come across in the world. 

5. Long Term Memory: It is the part of the memory which stores which is decades old. This is possible only if the information is repeated and rehearsed when it is in STM such that it enters into LTM. Usually the memory traces are well remembered when there is some emotional attachment with the instance. 

6. Memory distortion: Cognitive Psychology helps to understand the causes for the distortions of memory which occurs in our day to day life and it studies the process which is involved in forgetting of the information 

7. Autobiographical Memory: These are the memories especially about our first experiences which occurred in our lives. The study of autobiographical memories have become one of the most dynamic and interesting topics within the field of cognitive psychology. 

8. Knowledge Representation: Cognitive psychology studies how general knowledge is stored and retrieved 

9. Language: cognitive psychology gives importance how human mind learn language along with its syntax and grammar and more over how the human mind tunes itself to different language. 

10. Decision Making: The process through which we arrive at decision involves a complex interplay among other cognitive process such as attention, memory and knowledge retrieval. 

11. Problem Solving: Cognitive psychology involves various problem solving techniques.