Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is all about how our brain processes and stores incoming information, topics such as attention and memory for example are widely researched within cognitive psychology.

Unfortunately, when it comes to attention, we have a limited number of things we can concentrate on at once, don’t believe me? Here are two videos which show just how difficult it is to notice everything around us; video 1 and video 2This helps understand why people turn the music on the radio down when driving somewhere unfamiliar, it really does help them to concentrate on driving!

Another big topic in cognitive psychology is memory, of interest to many is how accurate people’s memory is. One influential researcher in this area is Elizabeth Loftus who delivered a TED talk on this particular issue

Cognitive psychologists are also interested in how people perceive the world around them, some visual illusions tell us a lot about how our brain processes information. Whilst some visual illusions remain unexplained as to how they trick our minds, some are quite well understood as explained in this article.

Finally, if you’re interested in mental health, the BBC All in the Mind podcast might be your thing. In the podcast they discuss a whole host of different topics from stress, procrastination and phobia. You can access the episodes here.