Psychology

While we are asleep, our sensory organs provide our brains with a huge amount of data about the outside world. However, instead of just feeling these sensations, our brains convert them into images, sounds, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. These mental...

At the turn of the 21st Century, a group of German psychologists proposed a different way of thinking about cognitive function and perception, instead of the prevailing ‘structuralism' of psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt, who sought to isolate the separate elements...

At the core of Gestalt theory is an understanding that people see the world in very similar ways. By applying these similarities, we can understand how people make sense of what they see. Gestalt principles provide ‘rules’ about how we recognize patterns in our...

Gestalt psychologists weren't the first ones who utilized the psychological idea of Gestalt. In 1894, the philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels describes Gestalt as an emergent property of a perceived object - the exact opposite of the main principle of Gestalt...

Theories that say that visual perception is a process that identifies objects based on the features they possess (like shape, color, size, orientation) are supported by the everyday experiences of seeing things such as faces, circles, and flowers. We seem to be...

Even though many European psychologists had studied mental processes, Cognitive Psychology as an alternative approach to Behaviorism did not emerge until later in the 20th century. During the Second World War, advances in computing and information technology provided...

At the forefront of cognitive science in the United States was George A. Miller who, more than anyone else, adopted the information processing model. He was one of the first people to recognize that human memory works something like a computer – that is, it consists...

Because of the limited capacities of STM, we cannot store everything. The brain has a finite capacity to store information – Miller’s magical seven items. Information about objects must be stored in sensory memory (short-term memory) until they are processed. When...

The British psychologist Donald Broadbent, like his contemporary George Miller, adopted a model of the mind as an information processor in the 1950s. He, too, recognized that there is much more information entering the brain than the brain can consciously process,...

Donald Broadbent‘s analysis of attention as an allocation of our limited capacity for processing received information was similar to analyses conducted in communications science in the following decades. The ‘cocktail party effect’, defined by information scientist...