COGNITIVE APPROACH

I learned that Cognitive approach focuses on the mental processing of information.  Cognitive psychologists study how we gather, encode, and store information from our environment using such mental processes as perception, memory, imagery, concept formation, problem solving, reasoning, decision making and language.  If you were listening to a friend describing his rock climbing adventure, a cognitive psychologist would be interested in how you decode the meaning of his words, how you form mental images of the jagged and slippery rocks, how you integrate the impressions of his experience in your previous  concepts of rock climbing and so on.

Cognitive psychologist take what is called an information processing approach in their studies, an approach based on the idea that humans are like computers in that both take in information, process it, and produce a response.  In fact, cognitive psychologist often express models of human thought processes with techniques used in the computer sciences, such as flowcharts (diagrams with arrows leading from one box to successive others) and mathematical formulas.