The term cognitive psychology came into use with the publication of the book Cognitive Psychology by Ulric

Neisser in 1967. Cognitive Psychology revolves around the notion that if we want to know what makes people tick then we need to understand the internal processes of their mind. Cognition literally means knowing. In other words, psychologists from this approach study cognition which is the mental act or process by which knowledge is acquired. Cognitive psychology focuses on the way humans process information, looking at how we treat information that comes in to the person (what behaviorists would call stimuli), and how this treatment leads to responses. In other words, they are interested in the variables that mediate between stimulus/input and response/output. Cognitive psychologists study internal processes including perception, attention, language, memory and thinking.

The cognitive perspective applies a nomothetic approach to discover human cognitive processes, but have also adopted idiographic techniques through using case studies (e.g. KF, HM). Typically cognitive psychologists use the laboratory experiment to study behavior. This is because the cognitive approach is a scientific one. For example, participants will take part in memory tests in strictly controlled conditions. However, the widely used lab experiment can be criticized for lacking ecological validity (a major criticism of cognitive psychology). Cognitive psychology became of great importance in the mid 1950s. Several factors were important in this:

Dissatisfaction with the behaviorist approach in its simple emphasis on external behavior rather than internal processes. The development of better experimental methods. Comparison between human and computer processing of information.

The cognitive approach began to revolutionize psychology in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to become the dominant approach (i.e. perspective) in psychology by the late 1970s. Interest in mental processes had been gradually restored through the work of Piaget and Tolman. Other factors were important in the early development of the cognitive approach. For example, dissatisfaction with the behaviorist approach in its simple emphasis on behavior rather than internal processes and the development of better experimental methods. But it was the arrival of the computer that gave cognitive psychology the terminology and metaphor it needed to investigate the human mind. The start of the use of computers allowed psychologists to try to understand the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with something simpler and better understood i.e. an artificial system such as a computer.