Trends in Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is concerned with several mental processes, including those involved in perception, attention, learning, memory, problem solving, decision making and the use of language. It is often said that cognitive psychology tries to understand how people represent their experience and then use these representations to operate effectively. Cognitive psychology holds that people are not passive organisms whose mental representations are simple or direct reflections of the outside world. Rater, they are active processors of environmental events, and as such they bring their past knowledge and their biases to bear on how they perceive and understand all current events. Thus perceiving, imagining, thinking, remembering, forming concepts, and solving problems, indeed all aspects of people''s mental lives, define the domain of cognitive exploration. This book presents important research which was carefully selected and screened for both current relevance and long-term advancement of the field.