Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes: perception, attention, memory, language, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. Where behaviorism confined psychology to observable stimulus and response, cognitive psychology opens the "black box" of the mind and asks how information is taken in, transformed, stored, and used.

The field's central metaphor is the information-processing model, which compares the mind to a computer: input arrives through the senses, is encoded, held in memory stores, and retrieved to guide behavior. Classic findings map this pipeline — sensory memory holds impressions briefly, working memory juggles a limited amount of information at once, and long-term memory stores knowledge more durably, with encoding strategies like elaboration and chunking improving what sticks.

Cognitive psychology also explains how thinking goes wrong in systematic ways. Heuristics — mental shortcuts like availability and representativeness — usually serve us well but produce predictable biases. Concepts such as schemas, functional fixedness, and mental set describe how prior knowledge both speeds and constrains problem solving. The field emerged in the mid-20th century "cognitive revolution" through researchers like Jean Piaget, Ulric Neisser, and Noam Chomsky, and it now underpins fields from education to artificial intelligence and cognitive-behavioral therapy.

On the AP Psychology exam, cognitive psychology anchors the units on cognition, development, and learning. Expect questions on memory stores and encoding, problem-solving obstacles, heuristics and biases, language development, and how the cognitive perspective differs from behavioral, biological, and psychodynamic approaches.