The psychology of learning and cognition is similar to the cognitive approach in the old curriculum. Cognitive psychology focuses on how we think, feel, remember, and experience the world. Or, more simply put: our thoughts.

The problem with our thoughts is precisely that they are our own—we cannot see inside someone else’s thoughts—in other words, we need to find other ways to investigate mental processes.

Cognitive psychology focuses on our mental processes. Areas included are memory, perception, and emotions. Why are you wearing that particular shirt today? Why do you like sushi more than pizza? To understand more about the choices people make, we need to know more about the thoughts that lead to a behavior. We also need to understand how emotions affect us and how our memory sets limitations or creates new possibilities*. According to the cognitive perspective, we must understand a person’s thoughts and emotions in order to understand their behavior.*

All of this means that there are some starting points that everyone working in cognitive psychology agrees on:

• Mental processes can be observed indirectly in concrete ways, which means we can test theories—even though the process itself cannot actually be observed (it happens inside the head—but manifests itself in ways we can see)
• Theories can be tested using measurable scientific methods
• Mental representations control behavior (thought → action)

In the new IB Psychology course we look at learning-theories of how we learn such as behaviouristic theories (classical and operant conditioning) and social learning theory (which comes again in context human relationships). The cognition part of this context deals with 2 major areas where the first one is memory. When we study memory we look at models of memory, different types of memory, theories of how we store information and how we retrieve memories (schema theory), as well as biological and cultural factors of memory. The second major area is thinking and decision making where we look at theories of how we thinking (like thinking fast and slow=dual process theory) We will look at biological, cognitive and sociocultural factors of learning and cognition in this unit.

Key theories for learning and cognition

Learning

Social Learning Theory

Classical and operant conditioning

Cognition

Cognition means thinking or mental processes and this is a key area in Psychology,

Cognition can be divided into: memory and thinking and decision-making

Memory

Thinking and decision-making