Cognitive Psychology

Arising in the mid 20th century, cognitive psychology represents a strongly positivist view point; referring to cognitive psychology's stance that knowledge is grounded sensory experience and positive empirical verification. Cognitive Psychology continues the trend of structuralism, functionalism, and behaviorism, as an embodiment the 8 roots of psychology, particularly in its insistence on critical empiricism and atomism, but also in the other 6 roots.

Cognitive psychology is seen as an extension of behaviorism, where behaviorism denied the existence of complex cognitive states, cognitive psychology accepts their existence, while maintaining the empiricist approach. Cognitive psychologist view organism as complex information processing units, who's cognitive functioning may be explainable in similar terms to the algorithmic logic used in modern computers. Cognitive psychologists best define cognitive processes in computational terms such that sensory data is "transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used"(Neisser 2000).

Cognitive Psychology is has bee propagated largely by the work of three men: Jean Piaget, Ulric Neisser, and Avram Chomsky.