ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the field of cognitive psychology, discusses its origins and major concepts, and describes how they may relate to prehospital medicine. The field of cognitive psychology started in the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to explain human mental phenomena such as problem-solving, language, memory, perception, attention, and reasoning. The chapter offers a brief overview of some domains of cognitive psychology that are relevant to human factors in emergency medicine. Memory is one of the most widely studied and well-understood topics in cognitive psychology. The first distinction cognitive psychologists make is between short-term and long-term memory. A major feature of short-term/working memory is that it is limited in capacity, meaning that only a certain number of items can be maintained at once. Whereas short-term memory is limited in capacity, long-term memory is essentially unlimited and, like a scaffolding, the more knowledge one has in a certain domain, the more they have the capacity to learn.
