THE COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE: IDENTIFYING THE ROOTS OF UNDERSTANDING

Efforts to understand behavior led some psychologists straight into the mind. Evolving
in part from structuralism and in part as a reaction to behaviorism, which focused
so heavily on observable behavior and the environment, the cognitive perspective
focuses on how people think, understand, and know about the world. Its emphasis
is on learning how people comprehend and represent the outside world within themselves
and how our ways of thinking about the world infl uence our behavior.
Many psychologists who adhere to the cognitive perspective compare human
thinking to the workings of a computer that takes in information and transforms,
stores, and retrieves it. In their view, thinking is information processing .
Psychologists who rely on the cognitive perspective ask questions ranging
from how people make decisions to whether a person can watch television and
study at the same time. Common elements that link cognitive approaches are an
emphasis on how people understand and think about the world, and an interest
in describing the patterns and irregularities in the operation of our minds.