Abstract
This chapter discusses the four characteristics of cognitive psychology: (1) purposiveness, (2) creativity, (3) structure, and (4) conscious experience. Cognitive psychology is a fuzzy term, referring to many disparate and often conflicting approaches across the history of psychology. Cognitivists tend to be concerned with active, internal processes of the organism that organize experience and action. Cognitivists have tended to view the explanation of purposive action as a central concern and to emphasize the great variety of human behavior that suggests a highly creative organism. The history and philosophy of cognitive psychology is crucial to understanding the particular directions and energies psychology has possessed as a discipline and as a science. A most profound influence on cognitive theory since the 1950s has come from the idea of the electronic computer as a model of mental processes. This influence has served to dispose of some of the problems of mind–body interaction that concerned psychologists of the 1890s.
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