Cognitive psychology: Overview

Cognitive psychology seeks to understand how we acquire knowledge about ourselves and the world, how this knowledge is represented in the mind and brain, and how we use knowledge to guide behavior. Major topics in cognitive psychology include sensation and perception, attention, memory, categorization, learning, language and communication, and thinking, reasoning, judgment, and decision-making. Cognitive development is discussed from both an ontogenetic and phylogenetic point of view. Cognitive neuroscience explores the neural substrates of cognitive processes. The cognitive point of view has been extended to personality, social, and clinical psychology, as well as to sociology, anthropology, and other social-science disciplines