Ch 6: Cognition Theories & Processes

About This Chapter

Cognition is one of the most difficult psychological topics to study directly. Psychologists can't see into our minds to discover how our thoughts are processed; instead, they develop experiments to reveal the kinds of fine-grained differences in behavior that can be linked to patterns of thought. In this topic, we'll take a look at some of the key areas of research within cognition in order to understand the techniques used and the concepts developed to investigate how we think.

Our first five lessons address questions of intelligence and creativity. We'll lay out some of the key terms in our introduction, then jump into the problematic history of intelligence testing to go over the problems psychologists have run into when trying to assess and measure intelligence. Our lessons on the biological bases of intelligence and multiple intelligences outline some main approaches taken to defining and understanding intelligence. A lesson on creativity and divergent thinking rounds out our intelligence module by introducing some of the theories on how creativity is fostered.

Next we'll devote two lessons to the thorny subjects of language and its acquisition. Language and thought are closely tied, so separating and attempting to define language on its own is a difficult problem pursued intently by many psychologists. Language acquisition in infants can help answer some of the most important questions about language, particularly whether we're biologically primed to learn it.

The last seven lessons address issues of information organization and memory. We'll cover information processing, attention and heuristics to get a sense of how the brain organizes the information it receives. Then we'll look at categorizing memory, improving short- and long-term memory and the problem of memory distortion. These lessons address the unreliable and limited nature of memory, and how we can use these observations to understand memory's processes.

Cognition is a diverse subfield of psychology, dealing with issues of intelligence, language and memory, among others. After viewing these lessons, we hope you'll come away with an understanding of the field's breadth as well as its unique problems and considerations.