cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology (or cognitive science) is the sub-discipline of psychology that is focused on the internal workings of the human mind, including perception, memory and the way information and emotion are processsed. Whereas behavioural psychology tries to understand the human mind at an input-output or stimulus-response level, cognitve psycholgy attempts to identify subprocesses that perform different aspects of cognition, the information flows between them, and to some extent the way these map into area sof the brain. However, it typically looks at a higher level than neuroscience.

Cognitive psychology is important for human–computer interaction as it can help explain and predict how people understand and interact with computers. It was also particularly important in the earlier years of AI inspiring aspects of symbolic AI.