ABSTRACT
Cognitive psychology covers a wide range of issues, which are all somehow related to the way in which people represent and process information. Cognitive psychologists study topics as diverse as memory and learning, visual object recognition, reasoning, decision making, problem solving and so on. Of course, it is impossible even to attempt to give an overview of such a broad discipline in a single chapter. Therefore, I shall focus only on two areas of cognitive psychology. The first area deals with the structure and organization of human knowledge, while the second addresses the way in which people solve problems. The choice of these two topics is not entirely arbitrary. They both have a long tradition, and they have recently witnessed remarkable theoretical developments. Therefore, I will present them as illustrations of cognitive psychologists’ continuing attempts to provide scientific explanations of very complex mental phenomena.
