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IB DP Psychology — Cognitive Approach | SL & HL | Paper 1
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define the cognitive approach, schema, and cognitive model using IB-aligned terminology.
- Explain how the Multi-Store Model of Memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin) describes the flow of information through memory stores.
- Describe the role of schemas in organising, filtering, and reconstructing information.
- Evaluate the Multi-Store Model using supporting and opposing research evidence in ACAS format.
- Apply cognitive model concepts to a real-world case study from the cognitive perspective.
- Discuss the extent to which cognitive models provide a complete explanation of human memory and thinking.
- Analyse cognitive models using relevant concept areas: Causality, Bias, Measurement, and Perspective.
Introduction & Context
Have you ever walked into a room and completely forgotten why you went there? Or read a paragraph three times and still not retained a single word? These everyday frustrations point to something fascinating: the mind does not simply record experience like a camera. Information is actively processed, filtered, stored, and sometimes lost — and the question of how and why this happens is at the heart of the cognitive approach in psychology.
Before the 1950s, psychology was dominated by behaviourism, which focused almost entirely on observable actions and ignored what happened "inside the head." The cognitive revolution changed this. Psychologists began to argue that to understand human behaviour, we must understand the mental processes that produce it — processes like attention, perception, memory, and reasoning. The cognitive approach treats the mind as an information-processing system, and cognitive models are the theoretical frameworks used to describe how that system works.
Cognitive models are not just abstract theories — they have practical implications for how we study, how we remember, how we make decisions, and how we can be misled. Understanding these models gives us insight into why human thinking is both remarkably powerful and surprisingly fallible.
🖥️ Analogy — The Mind as a Computer Think of the mind as a computer. Information enters through input devices (your senses), is processed by the CPU (your working memory and thinking), stored on a hard drive (long-term memory), and retrieved when needed. Just as a computer can only process so much at once, so can the human mind. And just as files can become corrupted or hard to find, so can memories. This analogy captures the spirit of the cognitive approach — though, as we will see, the human mind is far more complex and context-sensitive than any machine.
Core Concepts
To understand cognitive models, we first need to understand what the cognitive approach is actually claiming. Rather than looking at genes, brain chemistry, or social influences, cognitive psychologists focus on the internal mental processes that sit between a stimulus and a response. The claim is simple but powerful: it is not just what happens to us that shapes our behaviour — it is how we interpret and process what happens to us.
📖 Key Definition — The Cognitive Approach The cognitive approach in psychology is the study of internal mental processes — including perception, attention, memory, language, and reasoning — and how these processes influence behaviour. It treats the mind as an information-processing system and uses models to represent how information is encoded, stored, and retrieved.
The cognitive approach emerged as a direct challenge to behaviourism. Where behaviourists like Watson and Skinner argued that psychology should only study observable behaviour, cognitive psychologists insisted that the "black box" of the mind could and