Cognitive approach to understanding behaviour
Cognitive approach to understanding behaviour
The cognitive approach studies internal mental processes - memory, thinking, decision-making and emotion - through models and experiments. Exam questions ask you to explain models, evaluate supporting research, and apply cognitive findings to real-world contexts such as eyewitness testimony.
Core rules and concepts
- Memory models: the multi-store model separates sensory, short-term and long-term stores; the working memory model replaces a single STM with a central executive and phonological/visuospatial slave systems.
- Schema theory: Bartlett's 'War of the Ghosts' showed schemas shape reconstruction; schemas are mental frameworks, not simply errors.
- Reconstructive memory: Loftus and Palmer's leading-question experiments show post-event information alters reported memory.
- Thinking: dual-process theory (System 1 fast/heuristic; System 2 slow/analytic) and heuristics such as availability and anchoring.
- Emotion: flashbulb memories feel vivid but are not necessarily accurate.
Worked example
In Loftus and Palmer (1974), participants saw a car crash and estimated speed. The verb 'smashed' produced a mean estimate of about 40.8 mph versus 31.8 mph for 'contacted'; a week later, the 'smashed' group more often reported broken glass. Reasoning: the question wording changed what was reported, supporting reconstructive memory. Evaluation must note the laboratory setting, demand characteristics and that speed estimates are not the same as real-world memory. A strong answer uses the study as evidence for a process, not as proof that all memory is false.
Traps that cost marks
- Mixing encoding, storage and retrieval when describing a model.
- Claiming schemas always distort memory.
- Describing Loftus and Palmer without evaluating ecological validity or ethics.
- Confusing availability with anchoring, or System 1 with System 2.
- Treating flashbulb confidence as accuracy.