The Cognitive Approach
Ever wondered why you can navigate your school without thinking, or why two people can witness the same event but remember it differently? The cognitive approach explains this by focusing on internal mental processes - the operations happening in your mind like memory, perception, and thinking.
Computer models are a key part of this approach, treating your brain like a computer that processes information. Just like a computer, you receive input (what you see, hear, feel), process it, then produce output (your behaviour or response). This stimulus-response model helps psychologists understand how we handle information.
Schemas are perhaps the most important concept here - they're like mental filing systems that help you make sense of the world. Think of your "school schema" - you automatically know where classrooms are, how lessons work, and what to expect. These cognitive frameworks let you take shortcuts, fill in gaps, and make the world more predictable.
Quick Tip: Schemas explain why you might assume a new restaurant will have menus and waiters - you're using your "restaurant schema" to predict what will happen!
However, schemas can cause problems too. They can lead to inaccuracies in eyewitness testimony or, when faulty, negatively impact mental health by creating unrealistic expectations about ourselves and others.
The approach has clear strengths - it uses highly controlled lab experiments that eliminate confounding variables, increasing reliability and validity. But there are limitations too. Since mental processes are unobservable, researchers must make inferences (draw conclusions from evidence), which can be subjective. The computer model also shows machine reductionism - it ignores emotions and isolates behaviour to simple input-output, when actually we use many complex cognitive processes simultaneously.