Cognitive Psychology & Intelligent Systems

Cognitive psychology studies mental processes — perception, attention, memory, language, reasoning, and decision-making — often modelling the mind as an information-processing system.

Scope

It covers attention and memory, knowledge representation, language and problem-solving, judgment and decision-making, and links to artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Sub-topics

• Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems
• Robotics
• Neural Networks

Core questions

• How does the mind process information?
• How are attention and memory structured?
• How do people reason and decide?
• How can cognition be modelled computationally?

Key concepts

• Information processing
• Attention and memory
• Knowledge representation
• Heuristics and biases
• Problem solving
• Cognitive science

Key theories

Information-processing limits

Miller's work on the span of immediate memory helped launch the cognitive revolution.

Cognitive psychology as a field

Neisser's synthesis defined cognition as the processes by which sensory input is transformed and used.

Heuristics and biases

Tversky and Kahneman showed that judgment under uncertainty relies on heuristics that produce systematic biases.

History

The cognitive revolution of the 1950s-60s (Miller, Neisser, Chomsky) restored mental processes to scientific study; the heuristics-and-biases program (Tversky & Kahneman) and cognitive science and AI have since extended it.

Debates

Are people rational?

The heuristics-and-biases program documents systematic deviations from normative rationality, debated against ecological-rationality views.

Key figures

• George Miller
• Ulric Neisser
• Amos Tversky
• Daniel Kahneman

Seminal works

• miller-1956
• neisser-1967
• tversky-kahneman-1974

Frequently asked questions

What is the cognitive revolution?

The mid-twentieth-century shift that re-established mental processes (memory, attention, reasoning) as legitimate objects of scientific study, modelling the mind as information processing.