The Individual Perspective

If I were to align my career towards psychology, I would do my best to include each of the perspectives in my learning and problem solving; understanding the inner-workings of the mind is hard enough, and going about it from all angles will only help to uncover the mysteries of our minds. The angle that makes the most sense to me, however, is the cognitive perspective.

My alignment with cognitive psychology might simply be a matter of my being more comfortable with the perspective that seems to be an accesable territory of the mind rather than in the basement of it as with the psychodynamic perspective, or with elctircal and chemical processes or unchanging genes as in the biological perspective, or with external things as in the learning or sociocultural perspective.

The cognitive perspective is the first step in understanding our minds. It first considers the ways we understand everything else. Once we figure that out, the other psychological perspectives follow up with reasons why we understand everything the way we do. But we can't determine why something is if there is not a something to ask "why" about in the first place, and that's what cognitive psychology takes care of.

In 1967 Ulric Neisser introduces and defines the term "cognitive psychology" for the first time in his book, "Cognitive psychology." He says:

...the term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human
being might possibly do...

The cognitive perspective allows us more individuality than perhaps we are entitled to. It gives importance to our own thoughts and gives credit to our conscious selves.