Cognitive Psychology provides an introduction to the central principles, problems, theories, and experimental approaches of cognitive psychology, emphasizing the information-processing perspective while also examining its historical foundations and limitations. The book is organized around major areas of human cognition. Chapters 2 through 5 address episodic memory and related processes, including pattern recognition, attention, and memory, with particular attention to the movement away from rigid structural and stage models toward more flexible processing models. Chapters 6 through 9 focus on semantic knowledge and its role in everyday cognitive activity: concepts as building blocks of knowledge, the representation of knowledge in imagery and sentence processing, sentence and prose comprehension and its relationship to psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and the processes underlying reasoning and problem solving. The text is designed to make a complex field more accessible by identifying the main themes of each chapter, relating principles to existing knowledge, providing comprehensive summaries, examining seminal experiments and theories as parts of continuing research, and drawing attention to unresolved questions and the way scientific investigation develops.

Michael G. Wessells

Cognitive Psychology