Final answer:
Cognitive psychology is the study of how people think, perceive, remember, and learn, focusing on mental processes and how they relate to our actions and interpretations of the world.
Step-by-step explanation:
Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember, and learn. As part of the larger field of cognitive science, this area focuses on the way individuals interpret incoming information, evaluate it, store it, and apply it to decision making. Cognitive psychologists study various cognitive processes such as attention, language, memory, and problem solving.
Through the empirical method, cognitive psychologists also look into how experiences and cultural backgrounds influence the perception of the world around us. The interdisciplinary nature of cognitive psychology often results in collaborations with other fields such as neuroscience, philosophy, computer science, and linguistics, echoing the cognitive revolution of the 1950s that shifted the focus back to mental processes and made cognition central to understanding behavior.
The field of cognitive psychology is broad, encompassing research interests in a range of topics from attention to problem solving, and the diverse approaches used in studying these topics. Ultimately, this branch of psychology aims to understand the complexities of the mind and how our cognitive processes shape the way we act and interact with the world.