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Cognitive Psychologists In The Military

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Cognitive psychologists assume that behaviour is the result of information processing. By describing thinking as information processing, cognitive psychologists are making a comparison between the human mind and a computer. This is useful because minds and computers have some attractive similarities; they both have inputs, outputs, memory stores and a limited capacity for how much information it is given and how it has been programmed, so a person’s behaviour is determined by the information available in their environment, the way they have learned to manipulate information and the capacities for information processing in the types of brains that people have. Moreover, Cognitive psychology is primarily concerned with performing laboratory …show more content…

The military formerly didn’t employ psychologists, but in the mid-twentieth century psychologists provided the military with useful research about the military’s hiring practices and the performance of military personnel under adverse environmental conditions (for example, the effects of fatigue and oxygen deprivation upon aviators), and the military now employs psychologists extensively. To add to this, Cognitive psychologists have played a major role in modern education. For example, metacognition—a concept created by cognitive psychologists and employed by modern educators—aids students in evaluating their personal knowledge and in applying strategies for improving their knowledge in their weakest school subjects. Cognitive psychologists have also provided schools with the hierarchical method of organizing information, which has proven to be beneficial in the …show more content…

They assume that what we do us determined by the environment we are in, which provides stimuli to which we respond, and the environments that we have been in during the past. Behaviourists are unique amongst psychologists in believing that it is unnecessary to speculate about the internal mental processes when explaining behaviour. The behaviourist approach is deterministic as it argues all behaviours are determined by past events and that all human behaviour is controlled by external events which means that humans do not have freewill. It supports empiricism and argues that only behaviour that can be observed, measured and recorded should be classed as scientific. It also supports reductionism as complex human behaviour is reduced to simple component parts. Environmentalism is another assumption of the behaviourist approach as behaviourists believe that all learning comes from experience and that heredity has no play. Learning involves the formation of associations between specific actions and specific events (stimuli) in the environment. These stimuli may either precede or follow the action. Many behaviourists use intervening variables to explain behavior (e.g., habit, drive) but avoid references to mental states. Radical Behaviorism operant conditioning/behavior modification/behavior analysis): avoids any intervening variables and focuses on descriptions of relationships between behavior and

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