1. Cognitive Approach

2. The cognitive approach
Cognition means ‘knowing’ and cognitive processes refer to the way in which knowledge is gained, used and retained
Cognitive psychologists interested in how the human mind processes info
Developed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as an alternative to the behaviourist approach

3. Key assumptions of the cognitive approach
Behaviour is a result of information processing
Comparison of the mind to a computer
The role of schemas as a way of organising information

4. Schemas
Part of the mental processes identified by the cognitive approach are schemas
These are mental structures that represent an aspect of the world, such as an object or event
Small packets of information about the world
that we construct through experience.
Schemas help us to make sense of the world, by providing short cuts to identifying things that we come across(our building blocks of knowledge)

5. Schemas
For example,
It has a four legs
It has paws
It has fur
It barks
Your past experiences have developed a schema to recognise the description

6. Example of Schema Development
Raji (4 year old boy) Current schema – an animal with four legs is a dog Raji sees a cat crossing the street when he is walking to school with his mum Raji uses existing information (schemas) to interpret the object says to his mum look at that dog Raji’s mum says to Raji that’s not a dog that is a Cat Rajis previous schema has now been changed that Animals with four legs can dogs or cats

7. Child remembers the event
The computer analogy
Cognitive psychologists often compare the human mind to a computer.
Input = Information processed by the senses
Computer processor = Cognitive processes occurring in the brain
Output = Behaviour
PROCESS
Child remembers the event
INPUT
Seeing domestic violence as a child
OUTPUT
Bullies children at school

8. Cognitive Key Study Fallon & Rozin (1985)
Showed male and female students a series of body silhouette pictures of increasing size and
asked them to rate:
Their current body shape (‘current’)
Their ideal body shape (‘ideal’)
The body shape that the other sex would find most
attractive (‘other-attractive’)
They found that men rated ‘current’ and ‘ideal’ very closely together
females rated themselves as heavier than their actual size and their ideal size

9. What you need to include...
Piaget and his suggested stages of development.
Kelly