COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

From the perspective of cognitive psychology, what can be done to improve people's attention in real-life situations?

From the perspective of cognitive psychology, what can be done to improve people's attention in real-life situations?

A cognitive approach is the study of how knowledgebase systems acquire and use information in their interactions with the environment. Any reality that is able to be depicted as a knowledge-based system is open to a cognitive approach. Psychology understands the human mind as such a knowledge-based system, an active mind that acquires, transforms, and uses information by a variety of basic (cognitive) processes, such as attention, perception, memory, language, and reasoning. These active minds are assumed to be able to tune those processes to different contexts and to learn in a very flexible way. The cognitive approach is now, clearly, the dominant approach in different areas of psychology. (Richardson, 1999, 85)

Cognitive Assessment and People Attention

A general cognitive approach, as described above, may influence any type of assessment. However, when the object of assessment is a single cognitive ability, such as perception, memory, reasoning or problem-solving etc., the approach acquires more specificity. Detailed procedures of assessment have therefore been designed to investigate the cognitive abilities considered relevant to several tasks. These assessment procedures were either born in the context of experimental and basic research, or, in some cases, represented a genuine effort to design specific psychological tests. Classical psychological tests were also adopted and analyzed from the point of view of basic processes. The theoretical and empirical effort of the cognitive approach was greatly supported by studying exceptional individuals presenting specific deficits or strengths. In particular, by studying dissociation cases (which occur when a patient performs normally in one task but is impaired in a second), cognitive neuropsychology shows which aspect of cognitive activity deserves to be studied, analyzed and assessed. For example, theoretical research has highlighted many aspects of memory such as episodic versus semantic, short-term versus long-term, procedural versus declarative, implicit versus explicit, and verbal versus non-verbal memory. A cognitive analysis applied to clinical and educational settings shows which cognitive ability deserves more attention in order to design suitable testing materials. For example, given that implicit memory is a cognitive ability which remains intact in different groups of subjects with memory problems, it is assumed that there is no need to design many standardized tests to study this aspect. Differently, explicit memory which has been shown to be damaged in particular groups, such as old people and pathological subjects, requires the development of many standardized tests. Depending on the cognitive ability of interest, there are different procedures of assessment. (James, 1890, 15)

Perception

Many tests have been designed regarding perception aimed at studying whether the subject is able to recognize visual stimuli. They also highlight potential difficulties which, in subjects with good sensory skills, occur in the first stage of information processing (various disorders of visual perception are discussed in Koehler & Moscovitch, 1997). In the field of visual perception, particular success has been attributed to procedures ...