The cognitive approach The cognitive approach was developed in the 1960s as a response to the behaviourists’ failure to acknowledge mental processes. Cognitive psychology focuses on how people perceive, store, manipulate and interpret information; studying processes like perception, memory, thinking and problem solving unlike behaviourists. Behaviourists and cognitive psychologists believe that it is necessary to look at internal mental processes in order to understand behaviour. Information processing Cognitive psychology uses an information processing model, where information received through the senses is processed by various systems in the brain, because the information processing approach was first used to describe the way in which computers processed information, what goes on in the human brain is often explained using computing metaphors such as ‘encoding’, ‘processing’ and ‘retrieval’. Cognitive processing can be affected by a person’s beliefs or expectations; this is often referred to as a schema. Schemas are described as patterns …show more content…
When children are at this age their reasoning becomes concrete as they are able to begin to understand simple logical principles. Children become better at thinking about how other people might view a situation from their point of view as the egocentrism from the preoperational stage begins to disappear. This therefore means that they begin to realise that not everyone shares the same thoughts, feelings and opinions as themselves. • Stage 4: Formal Operational (age 11-18 years). This stage is where it allows adolescents to reason through symbols that do not refer to objects in the real world, for example in advanced maths. Children at this age are able to use abstract thinking which is where they are able to solve a problem without having to be involved practically therefore they are able to think through complicated ideas in their heads without having to see the concrete