ABSTRACT
Have you ever had the experience of looking for someone you know in a crowd and thinking you could see them, only to find that when they get closer the person you are looking at looks absolutely nothing like the one you are waiting for? Perhaps you have witnessed a crime and spent time looking through books of mugshots at the police station, only to get increasingly confused as you look at more and more pictures. You have probably at some time undergone the frustrating experience of trying in vain to recall something only to feel that it is on the tip of your tongue. What these experiences have in common is that they all happen because of the ways in which the human mind processes information. Cognitive psychology is the psychological approach which focuses on the ways in which we perceive, process, store and respond to information. The cognitive approach can
be applied to just about every area of psychology, and later in this chapter we can have a look at a couple of examples of cognitive approaches. However, cognitive psychology is also a major field of study in its own right and it is to this that most of the current chapter is devoted.
