SUMMARY OF COGNITIVE APPROACH

• The cognitive approach emphasizes the role of mediating processes in human behaviour. The central assumption is that behaviour can best be understood by looking at the processes which come between an environmental stimulus and the behavioural response.
• Models based on the role of mediating processes, such as the information processing model, have increased our understanding of phenomena like memory and problem solving, and also offered practical insights on enhancing their effectiveness.
• Memory is regarded as having three separate stages- sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Each stage has distinctive characteristics, with transfer between stages dependent on attention, rehearsal and coding.
• Forgetting from LTM can be interpreted in terms of either interference on context-dependence, each interpretation has been productive though in recent years the concept of context-dependent forgetting seems to have attracted more attention.
• Problem solving involves a series of distinct stages. Problems can be described as either convergent or divergent, depending on the number of possible solutions and the process for reaching a solution.
• While Gestalt psychologists emphasized the importance of an appropriate mental set and insight, more recent research suggests that problem solving skills involve learning to learn.
• In terms of information processing theory, solving a problem requires defining the initial state, goal state and operators. With distinct stages generating solutions can involve the use of either algorithms or heuristics.
• Language is an open-ended system of symbolic communication, whose basis may be partially dependent on innate physiological capacities, and partly learned.

• Controversy exists concerning studies of language capacities in other species, particularly primates who have learned sign languages.
• There is an interactive relationship between thinking and language, with the language we use at ;east partially influencing the way we think.
• The cognitive approach has also been applied to issues of social cognition such as cognitive dissonance and attribution theory. Cognitive appraisal theory has been used to understand emotions.