The cognitive approach: the study of internal mental processes, the role of schema, the use of theoretical and computer models to explain and make inferences about mental processes. The emergence of cognitive neuroscience.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to describe the cognitive approach: internal mental processes, schemas, theoretical and computer models, inference, and cognitive neuroscience. The examinable skill is to explain how psychologists study processes they cannot see directly (through inference and models) and to evaluate how scientific that makes the approach.

Internal mental processes and schemas

The defining move of the cognitive approach is that, unlike behaviourism, it does study the mind, but it does so scientifically by treating mental processes as something that can be inferred from observable behaviour. If a participant recalls more words from the start of a list than the middle, the cognitive psychologist infers a separate long-term store. This reliance on inference is both the strength (it makes the unobservable testable) and the weakness (the inferences are indirect, so the approach can be accused of being machine reductionist and ignoring emotion and motivation). Schemas illustrate the approach in action. They develop with age and experience, becoming more detailed and sophisticated, and they let us process vast amounts of information efficiently by filling in gaps with expectations. The trade-off is distortion: schemas can cause us to ignore information that does not fit, or to recall events in a way that conforms to our expectations, which is why eyewitness memory can be unreliable and why stereotypes (social schemas) persist.

Models and cognitive neuroscience

Models are simplified, testable representations of how the mind works. The information-processing model treats the mind like a system that takes in information (input), processes it, and produces a response (output), and underpins models you study elsewhere such as the multi-store model of memory. Computer models go further, using the hardware-software analogy: the brain is the hardware and the mind is the software, and concepts such as coding, stores and capacity come directly from computing. These models give the approach a scientific, falsifiable character but invite the criticism of machine reductionism, since a computer has no emotion, motivation or social context. Cognitive neuroscience is the newest strand. With the arrival of brain-scanning techniques such as PET and fMRI from the 1970s, researchers could observe which regions are active during cognitive tasks, giving direct biological evidence for cognitive theories and physically locating processes such as memory in the hippocampus. This has fused the cognitive and biological approaches and underlies modern applications in computer modelling and the diagnosis of cognitive disorders.