Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Since the end of the nineteenth century, three fields of psychology have attempted to understand the human mind: cognitive, differential and developmental psychology. Each of these fields was and still is driven by different epistemological assumptions regarding the nature of the human mind, has adopted different priorities in regard to the aspects of the mind to be studied, and has used different methods for the investigation of the phenomena of interest.
Specifically, cognitive psychology focused primarily on the more dynamic aspects of mental functioning to explain how information from the environment is recorded, represented, stored and processed for the purpose of understanding, problem solving and decision making in real time. Thus, the primary aim of research and theory in this field was to model the flow and processing of information in the mind. In general, according to this tradition, the human mind is an information processing system operating under limited representational and processing resources. Therefore, three aspects of the mind are of utmost importance in this tradition: representational capacity, control of processing and efficiency. Change in the information processing tradition is conceived as increasing automatization of performance on a given task. This is equivalent to saying that, with experience and practice, the control of performance shifts from the monitoring and regulation of central control processes to the forces underlying the dynamic organization of task-specific performance and the inter-connection of the components involved in this performance with the task-relevant environmental stimuli (Broadbent 1971; Logan and Gordon 2001; Posner and Boies 1971).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.