Psychology

Psychology is a discipline derived from philosophy which is

the parent discipline. The word psychology is derived from
two greek words – ‘psyche’ meaning mind and ‘logos’
meaning study. According to the American Psychological
Association psychology is defined as the scientific study of
mind and behavior. Behavior stands for responses and
actions that are directly observed and mind is defined as the
internal state and processes that aren’t observable yet can
be inferred through measurable responses

Psychology helps us to comprehend how are brain and body

connected. As a scientific discipline, it provides a very
systematic approach without creating any possible biases
which leads to faulty observations.

Cognitive Psychology
The term ‘cognition’ means knowing. Cognitive psychology is
a branch of psychology dedicated to the study of how people
perceive , learn, remember and think about information.
Cognitive psychology shares many research interests with
‘cognitive science’. Cognitive processes are continuously
taking place in our mind and in the mind of people around us.
Cognitive psychology is concerned with internal mental state
as it uses scientific research methods to measure mental
processes. The term scientific study means it is based on
experimental methods, empirical and observative. Cognitive
psychology concerned with how people acquire, store,
transform, use and communicate information (Neisser,1967)
Cognitivism adopts precise quantitative analysis to study how
people learn and think like behaviorism ;emphasizing internal
mental processes like gestaltism. Tolman (1948) work on
cognitive maps-training rats in mazes; showed that animals
had internal representation of behavior.

Cognitive psychology hopes to learn how people think by

studying how people have thoughts about thinking. It
involves a progression of ideas referred to as a Dialectic.
In a dialectic:
1) A thesis is proposed which is a statement of belief
2) An antithesis emerged which is counter statement to
thesis
3) Synthesis wherein some ideas from thesis and some
ideas from antithesis are merged to formulate a theory.
The dialectic may tempt us to think if one view is right the
other might be wrong. For example; in the intelligence is
either completely genetically defined or environmentally
defined. But ultimately both the views were synthesized to
form a new viewpoint that both nature and nurture plays an
important role. Thus characteristic of different approaches
are often integrated into a newer and more encompassing
approach.