Cognitive Psychology 🧠

Selective attention is the process of directing our awareness to relevant stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli in the environment.

Memory is the term given to the structures and processes involved in the storage and subsequent retrieval of information. For psychologists, the term memory covers three important aspects of information processing: encoding, storage, and retrieval.

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of intellectual development which reflect the increasing sophistication of children’s thought.

Top-down processing involves the brain “sending down” stored information to the sensory system as it receives information from the stimulus, enabling a plausible hypothesis to be made without the need to analyze every feature of the stimulus.

A schema is a knowledge structure that allows organisms to interpret and understand the world around them. Schemata is a method of organizing information that allows the brain to work more efficiently.