Cognitive psychology

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 58. Chapters: Consciousness, Gestalt psychology, Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development, Piaget's theory of cognitive development, Remember versus know judgements, Psychophysics, Multiple Drafts Model, Mental model, Affect infusion model, Adaptive comparative judgement, Eureka effect, Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, Eyewitness testimony, Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory, Infant cognitive development, Wolfgang Prinz, Cognitivism, Association value, Task analysis, Conceptual blending, Counterfactual thinking, Overchoice, Cognitive polyphasia, Bongard problem, Cognitive Resource Theory, Cognitive shift, Cognitive inertia, Naive diversification, Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Nonsense syllable, Three stratum theory, Deese¿Roediger¿McDermott paradigm, Encoding specificity principle, Mental mapping, Theory-theory, Hot cognition, Context effects, Xiangen Hu, Mentalism, Rigidity, Recall test. Excerpt: Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development has been criticized on many grounds. One criticism is concerned with the very nature of development itself. It is suggested that Piaget's theory does not explain why development from stage to stage occurs. The theory is also criticized for ignoring individual differences in cognitive development. That is, the theory does not account for the fact that some individuals move from stage to stage faster than other individuals. Finally, another criticism is concerned with the nature of stages themselves. Research shows that the functioning of a person at a given age may be so variable from domain to domain, such as the understanding of social, mathematical, and spatial concepts, that it is not possible to place the person in a single stage. To remove these weaknesses, a group of researchers, who are known as neo-Piagetian theorists, advanced models that integrate concepts from Piaget's theory with concepts from cognitive and differential psychology. Initially, neo-Piagetian theorists explained cognitive growth along Piagetian stages by invoking information processing capacity as the cause of both development from the one stage to the next and individual differences in developmental rate. Juan Pascual-Leone was the first to advance this approach. Specifically, he argued that human thought is organized in two levels. The first and more basic level is defined by mental power or capacity. That is, this level involves processes that define the volume and kind of information that the individual can process. Working memory is the functional manifestation of mental power. The capacity of working memory is usually specified in reference to the number of information chunks or units that one can keep in mind simultaneously at a given moment. The second level involves mental content as such. That is, it involves concepts and schemes about the physical, the biological, and the social world, and the symbols we use to refer to them, such as