There is a special difficulty about trying to write a book about memory, thinking and language, since these are just the processes which have gone into writing it.(At least one hopes some memory and thinking have gone into it and it is certainly presented in written language.)The equivalent volume to this in the earlier Essential Psychology series had the title Thinking and language.The implication was that thinking and language could be treated as independent psychological activities.Interestingly there were many scattered reterences to the influence of memory on thought and language.Ten years on,the role of knowledge stored in memory has moved to the centre of the stage. mental representations of knowledge based on past experiences,and the mental processes which exploit Knowledge in order to interpret and act in the world,are seen as central issues in psychology.
This concern with representations and processes is a trademark of cognitive psychology. Over the past thirty years cognitive psychology has emerged as identifiable theoretical standpoint fof explaining human behaviour.There have been many attempts to define cognitive psychology as a distinctive branch of psychology,comparable with social pschology,physiological psychology and abnormal psychology.potentially the cognitive approach can be applied to any area of human activity.Children's development can be charted in terms of acquiring more and more complex mental representations,as implied in the work of piaget.Social interaction depend on the way people represent the intentions and actions of other people.perceing the world through our senses results in mental representations of the environment.Indees it has been claimed (Mandler 1985 that cognitive psychology is well on it way to becoing mainstream psychology.
the area of psychology covered is not as wide as the empire building defenition of cognitive psychology nor is it concerned solely with consious cognition because of this ambiguity about the realm of cognitive psycholgy.
- moulay zakaria: MOULAY ZAKARIA