Topic 2: Cognitive psychology — Edexcel A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Topic 2: Cognitive psychology with PEARSON EDEXCEL A-Level practice questions.
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Topic 2: Cognitive psychology explained
This approach treats what happens between a stimulus and a response as the thing to be explained, and it studies it by inference, because nobody can see a schema and so the researcher measures recall, reaction time or error and reasons backwards to the process that produced them.
Read the full explanation
Bartlett (1932) asked English participants to retell a Native American folk tale and found reproductions grew shorter, lost unfamiliar detail and drifted towards English conventions, canoes turning into boats, which supports remembering as reconstruction guided by prior knowledge. Neisser gathered the field under one name in the nineteen sixties, and cognitive neuroscience later anchored the inferences in brain imaging. Evaluation turns on the trade between tight measurement and artificial tasks.
Processes include perception, memory, selective attention, language and problem solving.
Cognitive psychology investigates internal mental processes. Perception involves interpreting sensory information to understand the environment. Memory is the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information over time. Selective attention is the ability to focus on specific stimuli while filtering out irrelevant background information. Language encompasses the acquisition, comprehension, and production of words and sentences to communicate. Problem solving involves cognitive steps taken to overcome obstacles and reach a desired goal. These processes provide the foundational context for the topic and are often studied using controlled laboratory experiments to isolate variables and measure performance objectively.
The cognitive topic area draws on the likeness of cognitive processing to computer processing.
The information processing analogy borrows the computer's vocabulary of input, encoding, storage, retrieval and output, together with limited capacity and a split between the program and the machine that runs it. Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) drew memory as exactly that kind of flow diagram, boxes joined by arrows with rehearsal as the transfer routine, and later connectionist models swapped the single processor for networks of units that learn by adjusting the strength of their connections. The analogy earns its place because it makes predictions precise enough to be programmed and tested, and it has driven artificial intelligence, but it is attacked as machine reductionism: hardware never gets tired, anxious or motivated, and human storage rebuilds what it holds instead of returning it untouched.
Individual differences and developmental psychology must be considered when learning about memory differences, memory deficits and how this develops as the brain ages.
Memory is not one ability held by everyone in the same measure, and the examiner wants both the differences between people and the changes across a lifetime. Cases of deficit carry most of the argument. The patient known as HM, described by Scoville and Milner, could form no new long term episodic memories after surgery yet still improved at motor skills he could not remember practising, and patient KF, reported by Shallice and Warrington, had a verbal span of roughly two items alongside intact long term learning, which is hard to explain with one undivided short term store. Schmolck and colleagues (2002) found semantic knowledge impaired only where damage spread into lateral temporal cortex. Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil (2012) traced digit span rising steadily through childhood in Madrid.
Your focus
- Students must show understanding that cognitive psychology is about the role of cognition/cognitive processes in human behaviour.
- Define and distinguish between perception, memory, selective attention, language, and problem solving.
- Explain how cognitive processes interact to process information from the environment.
Show all 6 objectives
- Evaluate the strengths and limitations of studying cognitive processes in controlled laboratory settings.
- The cognitive topic area draws on the likeness of cognitive processing to computer processing.
- Individual differences and developmental psychology must be considered when learning about memory differences, memory deficits and how this develops as the brain ages.
Topic 2: Cognitive psychology exam tips
Marking Points
- State the claim of the approach, that behaviour is produced by internal mental processes which can be modelled and tested, which marks it off from behaviourism without denying that learning matters.
- Explain inference explicitly, that mental processes are never observed directly but are inferred from measurable performance, since this is the sentence most answers leave out.
- Bartlett's serial reproduction earns credit only when the finding is given, that recall became shorter and more conventional and that unfamiliar detail was replaced by familiar detail.
- Credit for method: controlled laboratory experiments give reliable and replicable data, while the tasks used are often remote from everyday remembering, which limits ecological validity.
- Defining perception as the cognitive interpretation of sensory input, distinguishing it from raw sensation.
- Explaining memory as the system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information, often measured through recall or recognition tasks.
- Describing selective attention as focusing on a target stimulus while ignoring distractors, and problem solving as navigating from an initial state to a goal state.
- Identifying language as a cognitive process involving the comprehension and production of linguistic structures.
- Set the analogy out in its own terms, that sensory input is encoded, held in stores of limited capacity and duration and retrieved as output, with the brain as hardware and mental processes as the software running on it.
- Use a model that really is a flow diagram, such as the multi store model, to show the analogy working rather than simply asserting that it exists.
- Credit for the strength that computational models are precise enough to be programmed and therefore falsifiable, which is a large part of why this approach counts as scientific.
- Evaluation credit for machine reductionism, since the analogy leaves out emotion, motivation and the social setting of remembering, and a computer does not distort what it stores the way Bartlett's participants did.
Examiner Tips
- 💡Questions on what the approach assumes are usually short, so keep a two sentence definition and one named study ready and spend the remaining time on evaluation.
- 💡The papers often ask for a comparison with the social or the learning approach, so revise one clear contrast about method and one about explanation.
- 💡Use the phrases internal mental process and inferred from behaviour in your opening line, because markers look for that technical wording.
- 💡Questions frequently present an everyday scenario; practise identifying the specific cognitive process involved before explaining it.
- 💡Use these foundational processes to contextualise your understanding of specific cognitive models, such as those for memory.
- 💡Avoid relying on specific named studies unless explicitly asked, focusing instead on defining the processes themselves accurately.
- 💡This is a favourite for explain and evaluate questions of medium length where roughly half the marks are for limitations, so split your time accordingly.
- 💡One worked example beats three asserted ones, so take a single model right through from input to output.
- 💡Name the reductionism and holism debate and then apply it, because the debate earns credit when it is used rather than defined.
- 💡Questions often ask how one case supports or challenges a model of memory, so rehearse the linking sentence rather than the patient's biography.
- 💡Individual differences and developmental psychology are examined across topics, so be ready to bring them into an essay whose headline subject is a model or a study.
- 💡Name the researchers even where you cannot recall the year, because an undated accurate finding scores and an invented date does not.
Common Mistakes
- Describing cognition as simply thinking, when the specification means specified processes that take an input, operate on it and yield an output.
- Claiming the approach ignores biology, when cognitive neuroscience belongs to it and scanning evidence is routinely used to support its models.
- Calling the approach fully deterministic, when it is normally described as soft determinism because processing constrains choice rather than removing it.
- Assuming cognitive processes operate entirely independently, rather than recognising how attention determines what enters memory.
- Confusing sensation with perception, losing the distinction between raw sensory input and top-down cognitive interpretation.
- Treating introductory concepts like language or problem solving as major standalone essay topics, rather than foundational context for the cognitive approach.
- Stating that the brain is a computer rather than that it resembles one in specified respects, when the whole point is that this is a model.
- Praising the analogy without saying where it breaks down, which keeps an answer out of the higher evaluation bands.
- Describing the multi store model at length and never saying what makes it an information processing account.
- Writing that HM had no memory at all, when he retained much of his childhood past and went on learning motor skills, so the loss was specific rather than total.
- Treating ordinary ageing and amnesia as the same process, when age related change is gradual, partial and much heavier on some tasks than others.
- Offering a case study as proof of a model instead of as evidence consistent with it.