The Cognitive Approach

Cognitive processing can often be affected by schemas, these are mental frameworks of beliefs and expectations developed from experience that help us to organise and interpret information. For example, we have a schema for what a door is and how to use it as we have learnt from experience. As we get older, more information is assimilated into our schemas and they become more detailed and sophisticated. Schemas help to simplify the world around us and are useful in allowing us to take shortcuts, preventing us from being overwhelmed by environmental stimuli and facilitates interpreting the vast amount of information that is available in our environment. However, Schemas can distort interpretation of information and exclude things., for example schemas can be used to explain how eyewitness memories of events can be distorted therefore inaccurate, causing us to overlook important details and only focus on things that confirm our pre-existing beliefs. Therefore, schemas can contribute to stereotypes.

The cognitive approach has led to the emergence of cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the influence of brain structures on mental processes, mapping cognitive functions to specific areas of the brain. This can be done through the use of brain scanning such as fMRI and PET scans. By identifying areas of the brain, associated with particular problems treatments can begin to be developed. For example, Specific areas of the brain are active when dealing with different types of memory and retrieval, areas such as the hippocampal gyrus are linked with OCD suggesting that aspects of people's thought processes have a physical basis.

Strengths of the cognitive approach include that it has had useful applications, for example cognitive behavioural therapy, which has shown to be effective for a range of different mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety. Therefore, it has been highly beneficial within today's society as unlike drugs it has no side effects. Furthermore, the cognitive approach uses scientific methods, mainly lab experiments, these use objective data, are controlled and replicable and therefore the results are reliable. However, a limitation is as it depends largely on controlled experiments to observe human behaviour, that are studiedunder artificial conditions, they may not reflect how people process information in their everyday life and therefore it may lack ecological validity and not might not explain how memory works outside of the laboratory.

Additionally, as cognitive psychologists are only able to infer mental processes from what they observe in their research, many concepts within this approach are hard to test as internal mental processes cannot be directly measured. This means it is hard to know how accurate the explanations are.