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What Is Cognitive Psychology?

The Science of How We Think

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Steven Gans, MD is board-certified in psychiatry and is an active supervisor, teacher, and mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Topics in Cognitive Psychology

• Current Research
• Cognitive Approach in Practice

Careers in Cognitive Psychology

How cognitive psychology differs from other branches of psychology, frequently asked questions.

Cognitive psychology involves the study of internal mental processes—all of the workings inside your brain, including perception, thinking, memory, attention, language, problem-solving, and learning.

Cognitive psychology--the study of how people think and process information--helps researchers understand the human brain. It also allows psychologists to help people deal with psychological difficulties.

This article discusses what cognitive psychology is, the history of this field, and current directions for research. It also covers some of the practical applications for cognitive psychology research and related career options you might consider.

Findings from cognitive psychology help us understand how people think, including how they acquire and store memories. By knowing more about how these processes work, psychologists can develop new ways of helping people with cognitive problems.

Cognitive psychologists explore a wide variety of topics related to thinking processes. Some of these include: 

• Attention --our ability to process information in the environment while tuning out irrelevant details
• Choice-based behavior --actions driven by a choice among other possibilities
• Decision-making
• Information processing
• Language acquisition --how we learn to read, write, and express ourselves
• Problem-solving
• Speech perception -how we process what others are saying
• Visual perception --how we see the physical world around us

History of Cognitive Psychology

Although it is a relatively young branch of psychology , it has quickly grown to become one of the most popular subfields. Cognitive psychology grew into prominence between the 1950s and 1970s.

Prior to this time, behaviorism was the dominant perspective in psychology. This theory holds that we learn all our behaviors from interacting with our environment. It focuses strictly on observable behavior, not thought and emotion. Then, researchers became more interested in the internal processes that affect behavior instead of just the behavior itself. 

This shift is often referred to as the cognitive revolution in psychology. During this time, a great deal of research on topics including memory, attention, and language acquisition began to emerge. 

In 1967, the psychologist Ulric Neisser introduced the term cognitive psychology, which he defined as the study of the processes behind the perception, transformation, storage, and recovery of information.

Cognitive psychology became more prominent after the 1950s as a result of the cognitive revolution.

Current Research in Cognitive Psychology

The field of cognitive psychology is both broad and diverse. It touches on many aspects of daily life. There are numerous practical applications for this research, such as providing help coping with memory disorders, making better decisions , recovering from brain injury, treating learning disorders, and structuring educational curricula to enhance learning.

Current research on cognitive psychology helps play a role in how professionals approach the treatment of mental illness, traumatic brain injury, and degenerative brain diseases.

Thanks to the work of cognitive psychologists, we can better pinpoint ways to measure human intellectual abilities, develop new strategies to combat memory problems, and decode the workings of the human brain—all of which ultimately have a powerful impact on how we treat cognitive disorders.

The field of cognitive psychology is a rapidly growing area that continues to add to our understanding of the many influences that mental processes have on our health and daily lives.

From understanding how cognitive processes change as a child develops to looking at how the brain transforms sensory inputs into perceptions, cognitive psychology has helped us gain a deeper and richer understanding of the many mental events that contribute to our daily existence and overall well-being.

The Cognitive Approach in Practice

In addition to adding to our understanding of how the human mind works, the field of cognitive psychology has also had an impact on approaches to mental health. Before the 1970s, many mental health treatments were focused more on psychoanalytic , behavioral , and humanistic approaches.

The so-called "cognitive revolution" put a greater emphasis on understanding the way people process information and how thinking patterns might contribute to psychological distress. Thanks to research in this area, new approaches to treatment were developed to help treat depression, anxiety, phobias, and other psychological disorders .

Cognitive behavioral therapy and rational emotive behavior therapy are two methods in which clients and therapists focus on the underlying cognitions, or thoughts, that contribute to psychological distress.

What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an approach that helps clients identify irrational beliefs and other cognitive distortions that are in conflict with reality and then aid them in replacing such thoughts with more realistic, healthy beliefs.

If you are experiencing symptoms of a psychological disorder that would benefit from the use of cognitive approaches, you might see a psychologist who has specific training in these cognitive treatment methods.

These professionals frequently go by titles other than cognitive psychologists, such as psychiatrists, clinical psychologists , or counseling psychologists , but many of the strategies they use are rooted in the cognitive tradition.

Many cognitive psychologists specialize in research with universities or government agencies. Others take a clinical focus and work directly with people who are experiencing challenges related to mental processes. They work in hospitals, mental health clinics, and private practices.

Research psychologists in this area often concentrate on a particular topic, such as memory. Others work directly on health concerns related to cognition, such as degenerative brain disorders and brain injuries.

Treatments rooted in cognitive research focus on helping people replace negative thought patterns with more positive, realistic ones. With the help of cognitive psychologists, people are often able to find ways to cope and even overcome such difficulties.

Reasons to Consult a Cognitive Psychologist

• Alzheimer's disease, dementia, or memory loss
• Brain trauma treatment
• Cognitive therapy for a mental health condition
• Interventions for learning disabilities
• Perceptual or sensory issues
• Therapy for a speech or language disorder

Whereas behavioral and some other realms of psychology focus on actions--which are external and observable--cognitive psychology is instead concerned with the thought processes behind the behavior. Cognitive psychologists see the mind as if it were a computer, taking in and processing information, and seek to understand the various factors involved.

A Word From Verywell

Cognitive psychology plays an important role in understanding the processes of memory, attention, and learning. It can also provide insights into cognitive conditions that may affect how people function.

Being diagnosed with a brain or cognitive health problem can be daunting, but it is important to remember that you are not alone. Together with a healthcare provider, you can come up with an effective treatment plan to help address brain health and cognitive problems.

Your treatment may involve consulting with a cognitive psychologist who has a background in the specific area of concern that you are facing, or you may be referred to another mental health professional that has training and experience with your particular condition.

Ulric Neisser is considered the founder of cognitive psychology. He was the first to introduce the term and to define the field of cognitive psychology. His primary interests were in the areas of perception and memory, but he suggested that all aspects of human thought and behavior were relevant to the study of cognition.

A cognitive map refers to a mental representation of an environment. Such maps can be formed through observation as well as through trial and error. These cognitive maps allow people to orient themselves in their environment.

While they share some similarities, there are some important differences between cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology. While cognitive psychology focuses on thinking processes, cognitive neuroscience is focused on finding connections between thinking and specific brain activity. Cognitive neuroscience also looks at the underlying biology that influences how information is processed.

Cognitive psychology is a form of experimental psychology. Cognitive psychologists use experimental methods to study the internal mental processes that play a role in behavior.

Sternberg RJ, Sternberg K. Cognitive Psychology . Wadsworth/Cengage Learning. 

Krapfl JE. Behaviorism and society . Behav Anal. 2016;39(1):123-9. doi:10.1007/s40614-016-0063-8

Cutting JE. Ulric Neisser (1928-2012) . Am Psychol . 2012;67(6):492. doi:10.1037/a0029351

Ruggiero GM, Spada MM, Caselli G, Sassaroli S. A historical and theoretical review of cognitive behavioral therapies: from structural self-knowledge to functional processes .  J Ration Emot Cogn Behav Ther . 2018;36(4):378-403. doi:10.1007/s10942-018-0292-8

Parvin P. Ulric Neisser, cognitive psychology pioneer, dies . Emory News Center.

APA Dictionary of Psychology. Cognitive map . American Psychological Association.

Forstmann BU, Wagenmakers EJ, Eichele T, Brown S, Serences JT. Reciprocal relations between cognitive neuroscience and formal cognitive models: opposites attract? . Trends Cogn Sci . 2011;15(6):272-279. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.04.002

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Cognitive Psychology

History of cognitive psychology.

The history of cognitive psychology can be parsed into four periods: philosophical, early experimental, the cognitive revolution, and modern cognitive psychology.

Philosophical Period

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics suggest that thoughtful people were concerned with processes such as thought, memory, and most of all the “ka”, or soul, Great energy was directed toward preserving the soul but also some theorized that knowledge was localized in the heart. Greek philosophers were obsessed with knowledge and cognitive matters and current models of cognition often have some ties to ancient Greece. Aristotle’s views on the locus of knowledge were similar to the Egyptians. However, Plato postulated that the brain was the true locus of knowledge. Renaissance scholars considered thinking, logic, and the nature of the soul and, al­though divergent views were expressed, the locus of the knowledge and rationality was thought to be in the brain.

During the eighteenth century, philosophic debate over the source of knowledge took place between the empiricist and the nativist. A British empiricist believed knowledge came from experience. However, the nativist believed knowledge was innate and based on structural characteristics and properties inherent in the brain. Modern cognitive psychologists continue to argue these matters, although usually with scientific data.

The philosophic period provided a context for un­derstanding the mind and its processes. In addition, these early thinkers identified some major theoretical issues that would later be studied empirically using scientific research methods.

Early Experimental Period

Cognition has been studied scientifically since the end of the nineteenth century. In 1879, the philosophical aspects of mental processes gave way to empirical ob­servations when Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory in Germany in 1879. Psychology began to break away from philosophy and form a discipline based on objective science rather than on speculation, logic, and conjecture. Many forces propelled the break with moral philosophy, but certainly the development of new methods that allowed for the examination of mental events changed the way cognition was studied. Intro­spection, or looking within, was one such method that allowed the observer to examine consciousness and the structure of mental representation by breaking down an experience into sensations and images. By detecting patterns within introspective reports, the mind’s con­tents were presumed to be revealed.

Theories of knowledge representation became di­vided between introspectionists who studied observable sensations, and act psychologists, led by Brentano, who studied the activities of the mind. Brentano considered internal representations meaningless to psychology and chose to study mental acts of comparing, judging, and feeling physical objects.

By the beginning of the twentieth century American psychology was beginning to take a distinctive form with a wide range of topics under investigation. Lead­ing this expanded experimental psychology was Wil­liam James, the first president of the American Psycho­logical Association. His ideas on philosophy, religion, and psychology shaped the intellectual history of these topics throughout the twentieth century. No less im­portant were his thoughts about attention and memory, and his distinction of a dichotomy memory store—pri­mary and secondary memory—led directly to experi­ments in the 1960s on that topic. Clearly, James’s ideas were important in shaping modern cognitive psychol­ogy.

During this time, American psychologists became in­terested in educational matters and were greatly influ­enced by the objective nature of act psychology. Psy­chologists such as Thorndike were concerned with the effects of reward and punishment on learning and less concerned with consciousness. The introspective tech­nique, in which a subject asks himself what sensations he might experience, for example, were considered by American psychologists as being sterile and leading to inconsistent results. There was, argued many, a need for a purely objective and scientific psychology in which mental processes, such as memory, sensations, and learning, could be reliably measured. Behaviorism, led by John Watson, was predicated on the idea that overt behavior could be objectively observed, offered an at­tractive scientific approach to psychology, and was an appropriate foil to the rapidly developing interest in psy­choanalysis.

Despite interest in overt behavior, cognitive process were not totally neglected. During the early 1900s Donders and Cattell were conducting perception experiments on imageless thought using brief visual displays to examine the time required for mental operations to take place and using reaction time data as dependent measures.

In several laboratories in America interesting re­search was being done on memory, attention, percep­tion, language, concept formation, and problem solving that was the preformal stage of cognitive psychology. In addition to these efforts within psychology, several forces outside of traditional experimental psychology helped shape cognitive psychology. Among these forces are the considerable influence of the Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, whose central idea was that there are dis­tinctive cognitive stages through which children de­velop. In Russia, the brilliant young savant, Lev Vygotsky, suggested a model of development psychology in which learning precedes development. Another impor­tant influence was the work of Frederic Bartlett, from England, who investigated memory from a naturalistic viewpoint and was particularly concerned with the re­membering of stories. From recall of stories, Bartlett hypothesized that memory is largely determined by schemata, or the way knowledge is organized and rep­resented in the brain. Even some animal studies were beginning to embrace cognitive themes. In 1932, Tolman, a well-known behavioral psychologist, observed that rats learned a cognitive map of their environment while learning to run a maze.

Although cognition was not the dominant school of psychological thought in America during this time, some experimental psychologists demonstrated that scientific methodology could be used in the study of men­tal events. The techniques, subject matter, procedures, and even the interpretations used by these researchers anticipated the emergence of a cognitive discipline.

Concepts such as sensation, thinking, and mental imagery were anathema under the behaviorist’s influ­ence, as they were considered subjective. Internal states were considered intervening variables and not neces­sary to understand human behavior. Psychology had been concentrated on observable behaviors and human subjects were largely replaced with rats and pigeons.

Gestalt psychology offered an alternative way to study sensory perception to the problematic method of introspection that diffused the research on cognition. Concurrently the behaviorists attempted to create a purely objective psychology by successfully attacking the cognitive psychologists and Gestaltists as well.

Cognitive Revolution

Cognitive psychology began to take form as a new way of understanding the science of the mind during the late 1950s. These formative events were spurred on by research discoveries in memory, learning, and attention as well as ideas outside of the mainstay of experimental psychology, such as communication theory , develop­mental psychology, social psychology, linguistics, and computer science, which gave cognitive psychologists additional breadth to deal with the complexity of hu­man information processing and thinking.

The reemergence of cognitive psychology during this period is commonly referred to as the Cognitive Revo­lution, emerging in 1956 with a conference on com­munication theory at Massachusetts Institute of Tech­nology (MIT) (Solso, 1998) in which seminal papers were presented by Noam Chomsky, Jerome Bruner, Al­len Newell and Herbert Simon, and George Miller. The coalescence of cognitive psychology during this period was probably not due to a single group of people (and certainly no precise date of a movement is possible) but was a reflection of a larger Zeitgeist in which psychol­ogists appreciated the complexity of the thinking hu­man. At the same time, cognitive psychologists rejected the traditional, simplistic theories of the mind, but in many cases held on to the scientific methodology as had developed in the early part of the twentieth century. The paradigm that offered a pertinent methodol­ogy and embraced a sufficiently wide latitude of intel­lectual topics was cognitive psychology, which enjoyed widespread acceptance and growth.

Research in verbal learning and semantic organi­zation led to the development of testable models of memory and cognition, providing another empirical base for the study of mental processes. George A. Miller made a distinction between short-term and long-term memory and his influential paper The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two (Miller, 1956) addressed the limited capacity of short-term memory and introduced the concept of chunking—the idea that the limits of short-term memory could be extended by grouping in­formation into larger units of information. In 1958, Pe­terson and Peterson in America and John Brown in England found a rapid loss or decay of memory after the study of nonsense syllables after a few seconds when verbal rehearsal was absent, thus promoting the idea of a separate stage of short-term memory. In 1960, Sperling showed that a very transitory memory (or in­formation storage system) held information for a very brief period of time. This discovery further advanced the notion that humans were complex information-processing creatures who processed incoming infor­mation through a series of stages. That simple idea was a perfect model for researchers and theorists interested in memory, and several models appeared about this time by Atkinson and Shiffrin, Waugh and Norman, and later by Craik and Tulving.

Prior to this period, information theory was intro­duced by Shannon and Weaver, who used box diagrams to describe how information is communicated and transformed along a series of stages. Donald Broadbent, a psychologist at Cambridge, began applying Shannon and Weaver’s ideas to selective attention processes and introduced the concept of information flow to psychol­ogy and used box diagrams to describe cognitive pro­cesses. Broadbent’s information flow referred to the se­ries of operations that analyze, transform, or change mental events such as memory encoding, forgetting, thinking, concept formation, etc. As such, Broadbent provided “a language to talk about what happened in­side a man which was not a mentalistic introspective language” (Cohen, 1986, p. 23).

Elsewhere, technological advances in computer sci­ence called for reexamination of basic postulates of cognition. In 1955, Simon and Newell developed a computer capable of solving a mathematical proof. Cogni­tive psychologists were excited that machines could simulate human thought and computers could possibly be operating according to the same rules and proce­dures as the human mind. Furthermore, since com­puters were seen as intelligent, it required us to analyze our own intelligence so that the intelligence of a ma­chine could be determined. As a result the hypothetical Turing test was devised to determine if observers could discriminate the output of a computer from that of hu­man responses.

Meanwhile, the behaviorists came under attack from Chomsky, a linguist from MIT, who developed a method of analyzing the structure of language. Chomsky ar­gued that language was too complicated to learn and produce via behavioral principles of reinforcement and postulated the existence of a cognitive structure of an innate language acquisition device.

Another influence that aided cognitive psychology’s foothold was World War II. Financial support in areas of military interest became readily available during the war. Because of the military’s interest in developing and using new technology, research in vigilance, cre­ativity, and human factors was encouraged. One out­come was a seminal report in 1954 by Tanner and Swets on signal detection demonstrating that cognitive processes can have a mediating effect on sensory thresholds. Another outcome of the war was that many soldiers suffered from brain injuries. A vast amount of clinical data in perception, memory, and language was a by-product of these victims’ afflictions.

In the 1950s, interest turned to attention, memory, pattern recognition, images, semantic organization, language processes, thinking, and even consciousness (the most dogmatically eschewed concept), as well as other cognitive topics once considered outside the boundary of experimental psychology. Behaviorism and its dogma failed to account for the richness and diver­sity of human experience. Behaviorists could not ac­count for the results found by Piaget’s and Chomsky’s developmental studies. And information theory and computer science gave psychologists new ways to con­ceptualize and discuss cognition.

Modern Cognitive Psychology

By the 1960s, cognitive psychology had experienced a renaissance. Cognitive Psychology, which systematized the new science, was written by Ulric Neisser and was published in America (1967). Neisser’s book was cen­tral to the solidification of cognitive psychology as it gave a label to the field and defined the topical areas. Neisser used the computer metaphor for selecting, stor­ing. Recovering, combining, outputting, and manipu­lating information. And in 1966 Hilgard and Bower in­troduced a chapter in their Theories of Learning (New York) that developed the idea of using computer pro­grams to serve as models on theories of cognition.

The 1970s saw the emergence of professional jour­nals devoted to cognitive psychology such as Cognitive Psychology, Cognition, Memory & Cognition, and a series of symposia volumes, including the Loyola Symposium on Cognition edited by Solso and the Carnegie-Mellon series edited by Chase and others, based on the Car­negie Symposium on Cognition. In the 1970s and 1980s cognitive laboratories were beginning to be built, symposia and conferences appeared at national and re­gional meetings, courses in cognitive psychology and related topics were being added to curricula, grants were awarded to people investigating memory, lan­guage processing, attention, and like topics, new text­books were written on the theme of cognition, and uni­versities recruited professors of cognitive psychology to replace those of traditional experimental psychology. In the 1980s and 1990s serious efforts were made to find corresponding neural components that were linked to cognitive constructs. Thus, the cerebral location for a word, like hammer, as a noun, might be far different than the location for the same word if the word were used as a verb. Furthermore, influential memory the­ories (such as Tulving’s semantic and episodic memory theory) were manifest in cerebral localization experi­ments using brain imaging technology. The science of human cognition is still undergoing transformation due to major changes in computer technology and brain science. As a result cognitive psychology has converged with computer science and neuroscience to create a new discipline called cognitive science.

Finally, with the advent of new ways to see the brain (e.g. functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI], positron emission tomography [PET], electroencepha­logram [EEG]) cognitive psychologists have expanded their operations to neuroscience, which promises to empirically display the parts of the brain involved in cognition that were hypothesized by twentieth-century psychologists.

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• Published: 21 September 2023

Cognitive psychology: the experience you don’t know you have

• Antonia Eisenkoeck 1  

Communications Psychology volume  1 , Article number:  21 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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A recent study in Cognition provides evidence for phenomenal consciousness without knowledge thereof, by virtue of a sound detection and discrimination paradigm.

Can one have a conscious experience without knowing it? Whether consciousness without access to it exists has been widely debated. At the heart of it lies the question whether the distinction between phenomenal consciousness—what it is like to have an experience—and access consciousness—the ability to report it—is a purely conceptual idea or indeed a practical possibility.

The key challenge to tackling this question experimentally is that participants’ report of experience inevitably implies access to it. In other words, paradigms used in consciousness research typically study situations in which phenomenal experience and access to it are intertwined.

Yoni Amir and colleagues developed a new paradigm to circumvent this problem: Participants were presented with a range of sounds, sometimes including pink noise. The sounds were gradually turned off until only the pink noise remained. If people denied hearing the pink noise but noticed a change when it then suddenly stopped, according to the researchers, this showed experience without online access to it 1 . When subsequently asked to determine which out of two pink noise signals was the one they had unknowingly been presented with, people performed better than chance to identify the target sound—which authors argue is evidence for phenomenal (i.e., qualitative) experience. As evidence that this effect is not driven by unconscious processing (or at least not entirely), Amir et al. show that participants performed significantly worse (and at chance) in trials in which they had not noticed the abrupt end of the pink noise, in other words, in trials in which participants had had no experience of the sound.

Taken together, this study not only provides some compelling evidence that experience without access is not only a conceptual but also a practical possibility, but also offers a promising paradigm that can be used to continue on this scientific quest.

Amir, Y. Z., Assaf, Y., Yovel, Y. & Mudrik, L. Experiencing without knowing? Empirical evidence for phenomenal consciousness without access. Cognition 238 , 105529 (2023).

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Cognitive Approach in Psychology

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Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mind as an information processor. It concerns how we take in information from the outside world, and how we make sense of that information.

Cognitive psychology focuses on studying mental processes, including how people perceive, think, remember, learn, solve problems, and make decisions.

Cognitive psychologists try to build up cognitive models of the information processing that goes on inside people’s minds, including perception, attention, language, memory, thinking, and consciousness.

Cognitive psychology became of great importance in the mid-1950s. Several factors were important in this:

• Dissatisfaction with the behaviorist approach in its simple emphasis on external behavior rather than internal processes.
• The development of better experimental methods.
• Comparison between human and computer processing of information . Using computers allowed psychologists to try to understand the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with computers and artificial intelligence.

The emphasis of psychology shifted away from the study of conditioned behavior and psychoanalytical notions about the study of the mind, towards the understanding of human information processing using strict and rigorous laboratory investigation.

Summary Table

Theoretical assumptions.

Mediational processes occur between stimulus and response:

The behaviorists approach only studies external observable (stimulus and response) behavior that can be objectively measured.

They believe that internal behavior cannot be studied because we cannot see what happens in a person’s mind (and therefore cannot objectively measure it).

However, cognitive psychologists regard it as essential to look at the mental processes of an organism and how these influence behavior.

Cognitive psychology assumes a mediational process occurs between stimulus/input and response/output. 

These are mediational processes because they mediate (i.e., go-between) between the stimulus and the response. They come after the stimulus and before the response.

Instead of the simple stimulus-response links proposed by behaviorism, the mediational processes of the organism are essential to understand. Without this understanding, psychologists cannot have a complete understanding of behavior.

The mediational (i.e., mental) event could be memory , perception , attention or problem-solving, etc. 

For example, the cognitive approach suggests that problem gambling is a result of maladaptive thinking and faulty cognitions. These both result in illogical errors being drawn, for example gamblers misjudge the amount of skill involved with ‘chance’ games so are likely to participate with the mindset that the odds are in their favour so they may have a good chance of winning.

Therefore, cognitive psychologists say that if you want to understand behavior, you must understand these mediational processes.

Psychology should be seen as a science:

The cognitive approach believes that internal mental behavior can be scientifically studied using controlled experiments . They use the results of their investigations as the basis for making inferences about mental processes. 

Cognitive psychology uses laboratory experiments that are highly controlled so they avoid the influence of extraneous variables. This allows the researcher to establish a causal relationship between the independent and dependent variables.

Cognitive psychologists measure behavior that provides information about cognitive processes (e.g., verbal protocols of thinking aloud). They also measure physiological indicators of brain activity, such as neuroimages (PET and fMRI).

For example, brain imaging fMRI and PET scans map areas of the brain to cognitive function, allowing the processing of information by centers in the brain to be seen directly. Such processing causes the area of the brain involved to increase metabolism and “light up” on the scan.

These controlled experiments are replicable, and the data obtained is objective (not influenced by an individual’s judgment or opinion) and measurable. This gives psychology more credibility.

Replicability is a crucial concept of science as it ensures that people can validate research by repeating the experiment to ensure that an accurate conclusion has been reached.

Without replicability, a scientific finding may be invalid as it cannot be falsified. Additionally, scientific research relies on the peer review of research to ensure that the research is justifiable.

Without replicability, it would be impossible to justify the accuracy of the research. 

Humans are information processors:

Cognitive psychology has been influenced by developments in computer science and analogies are often made between how a computer works and how we process information.

Information processing in humans resembles that in computers, and is based on transforming information, storing and processing information, and retrieving information from memory.

Information processing models of cognitive processes such as memory and attention assume that mental processes follow a linear sequence.

For example:

• Input processes are concerned with the analysis of the stimuli.
• Storage processes cover everything that happens to stimuli internally in the brain and can include coding and manipulation of the stimuli.
• Output processes are responsible for preparing an appropriate response to a stimulus.

This has led to models which show information flowing through the cognitive system, such as the multi-store model of memory.

Information Processing Paradigm

The cognitive approach began to revolutionize psychology in the late 1950s and early 1960s to become the dominant approach (i.e., perspective) in psychology by the late 1970s. Interest in mental processes was gradually restored through the work of Jean Piaget and Edward Tolman .

Tolman was a ‘soft behaviorist’. His book Purposive Behavior in Animals and Man in 1932 described research that behaviorism found difficult to explain. The behaviorists’ view was that learning occurred due to associations between stimuli and responses.

However, Tolman suggested that learning was based on the relationships formed amongst stimuli. He referred to these relationships as cognitive maps.

But the arrival of the computer gave cognitive psychology the terminology and metaphor it needed to investigate the human mind.

The start of the use of computers allowed psychologists to try to understand the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with something simpler and better understood, i.e., an artificial system such as a computer.

The use of the computer as a tool for thinking about how the human mind handles information is known as the computer analogy. Essentially, a computer codes (i.e., changes) information, stores information, uses information and produces an output (retrieves info).

The idea of information processing was adopted by cognitive psychologists as a model of how human thought works.

The information processing approach is based on several assumptions, including:

• Information made available from the environment is processed by a series of processing systems (e.g., attention, perception, short-term memory);
• These processing systems transform, or alter the information in systematic ways;
• The aim of research is to specify the processes and structures that underlie cognitive performance;
• Information processing in humans resembles that in computers.

The Role of Schemas

Schemas can often affect cognitive processing (a mental framework of beliefs and expectations developed from experience). As you get older, these become more detailed and sophisticated.

A schema is a “packet of information” or cognitive framework that helps us organize and interpret information. They are based on our previous experience.

Schemas help us to interpret incoming information quickly and effectively; this prevents us from being overwhelmed by the vast amount of information we perceive in our environment.

However, it can also lead to distortion of this information as we select and interpret environmental stimuli using schemas that might not be relevant.

This could be the cause of inaccuracies in areas such as eyewitness testimony. It can also explain some errors we make when perceiving optical illusions.

History of Cognitive Psychology

• Kohler (1925) published a book called, The Mentality of Apes . In it, he reported observations which suggested that animals could show insightful behavior. He rejected behaviorism in favour of an approach which became known as Gestalt psychology .
• Norbert Wiener (1948) published Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, introducing terms such as input and output.
• Tolman (1948) work on cognitive maps – training rats in mazes, showed that animals had an internal representation of behavior.
• Birth of Cognitive Psychology often dated back to George Miller’s (1956) “ The Magical Number 7 Plus or Minus 2 : Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” Milner argued that short-term memory could only hold about seven pieces of information, called chunks.
• Newell and Simon’s (1972) development of the General Problem Solver.
• In 1960, Miller founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with the famous cognitivist developmentalist, Jerome Bruner.
• Ulric Neisser (1967) publishes “ Cognitive Psychology” , which marks the official beginning of the cognitive approach.
• Process models of memory Atkinson & Shiffrin’s (1968) Multi-Store Model .
• The cognitive approach is highly influential in all areas of psychology (e.g., biological, social, neuroscience, developmental, etc.).

Issues and Debates

Free will vs. determinism.

The position of the cognitive approach is unclear as it argues, on the one hand, the way we process information is determined by our experience (schemas).

On the other hand in, the therapy derived from the approach (CBT) argues that we can change the way we think.

Nature vs. Nurture

The cognitive approach takes an interactionist view of the debate as it argues that our behavior is influenced by learning and experience (nurture), but also by some of our brains’ innate capacities as information processors e.g., language acquisition (nature).

Holism vs. Reductionism

The cognitive approach tends to be reductionist as when studying a variable, it isolates processes such as memory from other cognitive processes.

However, in our normal life, we would use many cognitive processes simultaneously, so it lacks validity.

Idiographic vs. Nomothetic

It is a nomothetic approach as it focuses on establishing theories on information processing that apply to all people.

Critical Evaluation

B.F. Skinner criticizes the cognitive approach as he believes that only external stimulus-response behavior should be studied as this can be scientifically measured.

Therefore, mediation processes (between stimulus and response) do not exist as they cannot be seen and measured. Due to its subjective and unscientific nature, Skinner continues to find problems with cognitive research methods, namely introspection (as used by Wilhelm Wundt).

Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers believes that the use of laboratory experiments by cognitive psychology has low ecological validity and creates an artificial environment due to the control over variables . Rogers emphasizes a more holistic approach to understanding behavior.

The cognitive approach uses a very scientific method which are controlled and replicable, so the results are reliable. However, experiments lack ecological validity because of the artificiality of the tasks and environment, so it might not reflect the way people process information in their everyday life.

For example, Baddeley (1966) used lists of words to find out the encoding used by LTM, however, these words had no meaning to the participants, so the way they used their memory in this task was probably very different than they would have done if the words had meaning for them. This is a weakness as the theories might not explain how memory works outside the laboratory.

These are used to study rare conditions which provide an insight on the working of some mental processes i.e. Clive Wearing, HM. Although case studies deal with very small sample so the results cannot be generalized to the wider population as they are influenced by individual characteristics, they allow us to study cases which could not be produced experimentally because of ethical and practical reasons.

The information processing paradigm of cognitive psychology views the minds in terms of a computer when processing information. However, although there are similarities between the human mind and the operations of a computer (inputs and outputs, storage systems, the use of a central processor), the computer analogy has been criticized by many.

The approach is reductionist as it does not consider emotions and motivation, which influence the processing of information and memory. For example, according to the Yerkes-Dodson law anxiety can influence our memory.

Such machine reductionism (simplicity) ignores the influence of human emotion and motivation on the cognitive system and how this may affect our ability to process information.

Behaviorism assumes that people are born a blank slate (tabula rasa) and are not born with cognitive functions like schemas , memory or perception .

The cognitive approach does not always recognize physical ( biological psychology ) and environmental (behaviorist approach) factors in determining behavior.

Cognitive psychology has influenced and integrated with many other approaches and areas of study to produce, for example, social learning theory , cognitive neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Another strength is that the research conducted in this area of psychology very often has applications in the real world.

For example, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been very effective in treating depression (Hollon & Beck, 1994), and moderately effective for anxiety problems (Beck, 1993). CBT’s basis is to change how the person processes their thoughts to make them more rational or positive.

By highlighting the importance of cognitive processing, the cognitive approach can explain mental disorders such as depression, where Beck argues that it is the negative schemas we hold about the self, the world, and the future which lead to depression rather than external events.

Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Chapter: Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In Spence, K. W., & Spence, J. T. The psychology of learning and motivation (Volume 2). New York: Academic Press. pp. 89–195.

Beck, A. T, & Steer, R. A. (1993). Beck Anxiety Inventory Manual. San Antonio: Harcourt Brace and Company.

Hollon, S. D., & Beck, A. T. (1994). Cognitive and cognitive-behavioral therapies. In A. E. Bergin & S.L. Garfield (Eds.), Handbook of psychotherapy and behavior change (pp. 428—466) . New York: Wiley.

Köhler, W. (1925). An aspect of Gestalt psychology. The Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology, 32(4) , 691-723.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review , 63 (2): 81–97.

Neisser, U (1967). Cognitive psychology . Appleton-Century-Crofts: New York

Newell, A., & Simon, H. (1972). Human problem solving . Prentice-Hall.

Tolman, E. C., Hall, C. S., & Bretnall, E. P. (1932). A disproof of the law of effect and a substitution of the laws of emphasis, motivation and disruption. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 15(6) , 601.

Tolman E. C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men . Psychological Review. 55, 189–208

Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine . Paris, (Hermann & Cie) & Camb. Mass. (MIT Press).

Further Reading

• Why Your Brain is Not a Computer
• Cognitive Psychology Historial Development

7.1 What Is Cognition?

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe cognition
• Distinguish concepts and prototypes
• Explain the difference between natural and artificial concepts
• Describe how schemata are organized and constructed

Imagine all of your thoughts as if they were physical entities, swirling rapidly inside your mind. How is it possible that the brain is able to move from one thought to the next in an organized, orderly fashion? The brain is endlessly perceiving, processing, planning, organizing, and remembering—it is always active. Yet, you don’t notice most of your brain’s activity as you move throughout your daily routine. This is only one facet of the complex processes involved in cognition. Simply put, cognition is thinking, and it encompasses the processes associated with perception, knowledge, problem solving, judgment, language, and memory. Scientists who study cognition are searching for ways to understand how we integrate, organize, and utilize our conscious cognitive experiences without being aware of all of the unconscious work that our brains are doing (for example, Kahneman, 2011).

Upon waking each morning, you begin thinking—contemplating the tasks that you must complete that day. In what order should you run your errands? Should you go to the bank, the cleaners, or the grocery store first? Can you get these things done before you head to class or will they need to wait until school is done? These thoughts are one example of cognition at work. Exceptionally complex, cognition is an essential feature of human consciousness, yet not all aspects of cognition are consciously experienced.

Cognitive psychology is the field of psychology dedicated to examining how people think. It attempts to explain how and why we think the way we do by studying the interactions among human thinking, emotion, creativity, language, and problem solving, in addition to other cognitive processes. Cognitive psychologists strive to determine and measure different types of intelligence, why some people are better at problem solving than others, and how emotional intelligence affects success in the workplace, among countless other topics. They also sometimes focus on how we organize thoughts and information gathered from our environments into meaningful categories of thought, which will be discussed later.

Concepts and Prototypes

The human nervous system is capable of handling endless streams of information. The senses serve as the interface between the mind and the external environment, receiving stimuli and translating it into nervous impulses that are transmitted to the brain. The brain then processes this information and uses the relevant pieces to create thoughts, which can then be expressed through language or stored in memory for future use. To make this process more complex, the brain does not gather information from external environments only. When thoughts are formed, the mind synthesizes information from emotions and memories ( Figure 7.2 ). Emotion and memory are powerful influences on both our thoughts and behaviors.

In order to organize this staggering amount of information, the mind has developed a "file cabinet" of sorts. The different files stored in the file cabinet are called concepts. Concepts are categories or groupings of linguistic information, images, ideas, or memories, such as life experiences. Concepts are, in many ways, big ideas that are generated by observing details, and categorizing and combining these details into cognitive structures. You use concepts to see the relationships among the different elements of your experiences and to keep the information in your mind organized and accessible.

Concepts are informed by our semantic memory (you will learn more about semantic memory in a later chapter) and are present in every aspect of our lives; however, one of the easiest places to notice concepts is inside a classroom, where they are discussed explicitly. When you study United States history, for example, you learn about more than just individual events that have happened in America’s past. You absorb a large quantity of information by listening to and participating in discussions, examining maps, and reading first-hand accounts of people’s lives. Your brain analyzes these details and develops an overall understanding of American history. In the process, your brain gathers details that inform and refine your understanding of related concepts such as war, the judicial system, and voting rights and laws.

Concepts can be complex and abstract, like justice, or more concrete, like types of birds. In psychology, for example, Piaget’s stages of development are abstract concepts. Some concepts, like tolerance, are agreed upon by many people, because they have been used in various ways over many years. Other concepts, like the characteristics of your ideal friend or your family’s birthday traditions, are personal and individualized. In this way, concepts touch every aspect of our lives, from our many daily routines to the guiding principles behind the way governments function.

Another technique used by your brain to organize information is the identification of prototypes for the concepts you have developed. A prototype is the best example or representation of a concept. For example, what comes to your mind when you think of a dog? Most likely your early experiences with dogs will shape what you imagine. If your first pet was a Golden Retriever, there is a good chance that this would be your prototype for the category of dogs.

Natural and Artificial Concepts

In psychology, concepts can be divided into two categories, natural and artificial. Natural concepts are created “naturally” through your experiences and can be developed from either direct or indirect experiences. For example, if you live in Essex Junction, Vermont, you have probably had a lot of direct experience with snow. You’ve watched it fall from the sky, you’ve seen lightly falling snow that barely covers the windshield of your car, and you’ve shoveled out 18 inches of fluffy white snow as you’ve thought, “This is perfect for skiing.” You’ve thrown snowballs at your best friend and gone sledding down the steepest hill in town. In short, you know snow. You know what it looks like, smells like, tastes like, and feels like. If, however, you’ve lived your whole life on the island of Saint Vincent in the Caribbean, you may never actually have seen snow, much less tasted, smelled, or touched it. You know snow from the indirect experience of seeing pictures of falling snow—or from watching films that feature snow as part of the setting. Either way, snow is a natural concept because you can construct an understanding of it through direct observations, experiences with snow, or indirect knowledge (such as from films or books) ( Figure 7.3 ).

An artificial concept , on the other hand, is a concept that is defined by a specific set of characteristics. Various properties of geometric shapes, like squares and triangles, serve as useful examples of artificial concepts. A triangle always has three angles and three sides. A square always has four equal sides and four right angles. Mathematical formulas, like the equation for area (length × width) are artificial concepts defined by specific sets of characteristics that are always the same. Artificial concepts can enhance the understanding of a topic by building on one another. For example, before learning the concept of “area of a square” (and the formula to find it), you must understand what a square is. Once the concept of “area of a square” is understood, an understanding of area for other geometric shapes can be built upon the original understanding of area. The use of artificial concepts to define an idea is crucial to communicating with others and engaging in complex thought. According to Goldstone and Kersten (2003), concepts act as building blocks and can be connected in countless combinations to create complex thoughts.

A schema is a mental construct consisting of a cluster or collection of related concepts (Bartlett, 1932). There are many different types of schemata, and they all have one thing in common: schemata are a method of organizing information that allows the brain to work more efficiently. When a schema is activated, the brain makes immediate assumptions about the person or object being observed.

There are several types of schemata. A role schema makes assumptions about how individuals in certain roles will behave (Callero, 1994). For example, imagine you meet someone who introduces himself as a firefighter. When this happens, your brain automatically activates the “firefighter schema” and begins making assumptions that this person is brave, selfless, and community-oriented. Despite not knowing this person, already you have unknowingly made judgments about them. Schemata also help you fill in gaps in the information you receive from the world around you. While schemata allow for more efficient information processing, there can be problems with schemata, regardless of whether they are accurate: Perhaps this particular firefighter is not brave, they just work as a firefighter to pay the bills while studying to become a children’s librarian.

An event schema , also known as a cognitive script , is a set of behaviors that can feel like a routine. Think about what you do when you walk into an elevator ( Figure 7.4 ). First, the doors open and you wait to let exiting passengers leave the elevator car. Then, you step into the elevator and turn around to face the doors, looking for the correct button to push. You never face the back of the elevator, do you? And when you’re riding in a crowded elevator and you can’t face the front, it feels uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Interestingly, event schemata can vary widely among different cultures and countries. For example, while it is quite common for people to greet one another with a handshake in the United States, in Tibet, you greet someone by sticking your tongue out at them, and in Belize, you bump fists (Cairns Regional Council, n.d.)

Because event schemata are automatic, they can be difficult to change. Imagine that you are driving home from work or school. This event schema involves getting in the car, shutting the door, and buckling your seatbelt before putting the key in the ignition. You might perform this script two or three times each day. As you drive home, you hear your phone’s ring tone. Typically, the event schema that occurs when you hear your phone ringing involves locating the phone and answering it or responding to your latest text message. So without thinking, you reach for your phone, which could be in your pocket, in your bag, or on the passenger seat of the car. This powerful event schema is informed by your pattern of behavior and the pleasurable stimulation that a phone call or text message gives your brain. Because it is a schema, it is extremely challenging for us to stop reaching for the phone, even though we know that we endanger our own lives and the lives of others while we do it (Neyfakh, 2013) ( Figure 7.5 ).

Remember the elevator? It feels almost impossible to walk in and not face the door. Our powerful event schema dictates our behavior in the elevator, and it is no different with our phones. Current research suggests that it is the habit, or event schema, of checking our phones in many different situations that makes refraining from checking them while driving especially difficult (Bayer & Campbell, 2012). Because texting and driving has become a dangerous epidemic in recent years, psychologists are looking at ways to help people interrupt the “phone schema” while driving. Event schemata like these are the reason why many habits are difficult to break once they have been acquired. As we continue to examine thinking, keep in mind how powerful the forces of concepts and schemata are to our understanding of the world.

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Articles on Cognitive psychology

Displaying 1 - 20 of 26 articles.

Daniel Kahneman changed how we think about human nature – the psychologist remembered by a former student

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Cognitive biases and brain biology help explain why facts don’t change minds

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Eye movements could be the missing link in our understanding of memory

Roger Johansson , Lund University and Mikael Johansson , Lund University

Why does experiencing ‘flow’ feel so good? A communication scientist explains

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Andrei Lux , Edith Cowan University

As trust between Israeli Jews and Arabs reaches new lows, Netanyahu rises again

Eli Gottlieb , George Washington University

How the brain builds a sense of self from the people around us – new research

Sam Ereira , UCL

Seeing is believing: how media mythbusting can actually make false beliefs stronger

Eryn Newman , Australian National University ; Amy Dawel , Australian National University ; Madeline Jalbert , University of Southern California , and Norbert Schwarz , USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Humanizing the coronavirus as an invisible enemy is human nature

Michaela Porubanova , Farmingdale State College and Stewart Guthrie , Fordham University

No wonder isolation’s so tiring. All those extra, tiny decisions are taxing our brains

Ben Newell , UNSW Sydney

The partisan brain: cognitive study suggests people on the left and right are more similar than they think

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Are brain games mostly BS?

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What if consciousness is just a product of our non-conscious brain?

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Cognitive performance of post-covid patients in mild, moderate, and severe clinical situations

• Antonio de Pádua Serafim 1 ,
• Fabiana Saffi 2 ,
• Amanda Rafaella A. Soares 2 ,
• Alessandra Mara Morita 2 ,
• Mariana Medeiros Assed 1 ,
• Sandro de Toledo 3 ,
• Cristiana C. A. Rocca 2 &
• Ricardo S. S. Durães 1 , 3  

BMC Psychology volume  12 , Article number:  236 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Studying individuals with varying symptoms, from mild to severe, can provide valuable insights into the spectrum of cognitive outcomes after COVID-19. We investigated the cognitive performance of adults who recovered from the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) without prior cognitive complaints, considering mild (not hospitalized), moderate (ward), and severe (intensive care unit) symptoms.

This cross-sectional study included 302 patients who recovered from COVID-19 (mild, n  = 102; moderate, n  = 102; severe, n  = 98). We assessed intellectual quotient (IQ), attention, memory, processing speed, visual-constructive ability, as well as symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress, at least eighteen months after infection. The mean length of hospitalization was M days =8.2 ( SD  = 3.9) and M days =14.4 ( SD  = 8.2) in the moderate and severe groups, respectively.

Cognitive difficulties were present in all three groups: mild ( n  = 12, 11.7%), moderate ( n  = 40, 39.2%), and severe ( n  = 48, 48.9%). Using Multinomial Logistic Regression and considering the odds ratio, our results indicated that a one-point increase in sustained attention, visual memory, and working memory might decrease the odds of being categorized in the severe group by 20%, 24%, and 77%, respectively, compared to the mild group.

Conclusions

Our findings provide empirical evidence regarding the long-term cognitive effects of COVID-19, particularly in individuals experiencing severe manifestations of the disease. We also highlighted the need for a comprehensive, multidimensional approach in rehabilitation programs to address the enduring cognitive impacts of COVID-19.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

The cognitive impact after COVID-19 has become a subject of study and growing concern. Recent evidence has identified a set of characteristics, including long-lasting symptoms in individuals infected with the novel coronavirus disease Sars-CoV-2 (hereafter, COVID-19) [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ], including cognitive impairment associated with recovered patients who required hospitalization [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ]. Many individuals who recovered from the illness and needed hospitalization have reported persistent cognitive symptoms [ 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ].

More than half of hospitalized patients continue to experience neurological symptoms for up to three months after the acute stage of COVID-19 [ 11 ]. Alemanno et al. [ 12 ] assessed cognitive function one month after discharge in patients with severe COVID-19 and found that 80% of these patients demonstrated cognitive deficits, particularly in memory, executive function, and language, using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) for cognitive screening.

A meta-analysis of 27 studies (resulting from the analysis of 6,202 articles) assessed a sample of 2,049 individuals, with a mean age of 56.05 years, examining their cognitive function up to seven months after infection [ 13 ]. The MoCA results demonstrated that people infected with COVID-19 had worse overall cognitive functioning than those who were not infected. The authors verified that higher age was associated with worse cognitive performance in these samples through a regression analysis. Additionally, in describing case series ( n  = 9) of COVID-19 using screening tests (Mini-Mental State Examination - MMSE), Negrini et al. [ 14 ] observed general cognitive decline in 33.3% of patients with pathological scores regarding attention, memory, language, and praxis skills. The deficit in general cognitive functioning was associated with the length of stay in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). That is, the longer the length of stay in the ICU, the lower the MMSE score, indicating lower general cognitive performance.

Studies using neuropsychological batteries show that infected people suffer cognitive difficulties. A cross-sectional/longitudinal study investigated cognition in 130 women after COVID-19 infection (74% stated that they had “long COVID”) and 118 women with no history of COVID-19 aged 18–60 years for both groups. The COVID-19 group showed the worst results regarding reaction time and wordlist recognition memory [ 15 ].

Researchers in Argentina assessed the cognitive functions of 45 post-COVID patients 142 days after the illness and compared them to a control group of 45 participants and found that the COVID group performed worse on memory, attention, and executive function tests [ 16 ]. A Brazilian study, in which neuroimaging and cognitive tests were conducted on 61 COVID-19 patients with a mean of 59 days after diagnosis showed that 28% of participants had deficits in immediate episodic verbal memory, sustained and alternating attention, and cognitive flexibility [ 17 ]. Another study analyzed mental health and cognitive factors in 425 COVID-19 survivors between six and nine months after the acute phase of infection. Approximately 51.1% of participants reported subjective memory complaints [ 10 ].

In addition, several patients with mild COVID-19 symptoms without hospitalization have exhibited cognitive deficits. For example, in a study of 100 COVID-19 patients who did not require hospitalization, with a mean age of 43 years, Graham et al. [ 18 ] found that 53% had impairments in short-term memory and attention-related tasks. Hellmuth et al. [ 19 ] reported two cases with persistent cognitive complaints at 70 and 100 days after infection.

Based on current knowledge, the intricate interplay of various pathophysiological mechanisms associated with COVID-19 is linked to disruptions in brain homeostasis, resulting in cognitive symptoms and other manifestations. These mechanisms might establish connections with diverse pathways, leading to cognitive impairments, particularly in attention, working memory, and language-related attentional areas. Within this framework, factors such as the neuroinflammatory response triggered by the virus [ 1 , 11 , 20 , 21 ]. For example, a study showed elevated chemokine levels in the cerebrospinal fluid, triggering microglial activation in the subcortical and hippocampal white matter regions [ 23 ]. According to the authors, microglial activation in the hippocampus might explain memory impairments in affected individuals. Complications of the disease that required ICU admission due to pneumonia-induced hypoxia [ 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 ], and the influential role of age [ 27 , 28 ] play crucial roles.

Moreover, acute, and severe cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection may introduce psychiatric changes, encompassing depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, and psychosis [ 10 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ]. This multifaceted spectrum of influences underscores the complexity of the impact of COVID-19 on cognitive function and mental health, highlighting the need for comprehensive research to unravel these intricate connections and pave the way for targeted interventions and support strategies.

Given the above, studying individuals with varying symptom severity, from mild to severe, can provide valuable insights into the spectrum of post-COVID-19 cognitive outcomes. This study aims to assess the cognitive performance of individuals affected by COVID-19, considering the different levels of disease severity, in a follow-up of at least 18 months after the infection, who did not have any previous cognitive complaints. Therefore, we present the following hypothesis: Individuals who experienced more severe forms of COVID-19 will exhibit a reduced cognitive performance compared to those who had mild to moderate forms 18 months after infection.

Sample size

The G*power software (version 3.1.9.7) was employed to calculate the statistical power of the study. We applied a = 0.05, medium effect size f 2 = 18, 10 number of predictors, and aimed for a power = 0.80 for regression analyses. The estimated sample size for the current study was approximately N  = 300.

Participants

Cross-sectional data was collected from 302 volunteers (151 women and 151 men aged > 18 years) recruited from various social segments of public and private hospitals. The sample was categorized into three groups based on COVID-19 symptoms, according to the criteria established in Brazil throughout the pandemic: mild ( n  = 102), patients with fever, loss of smell and taste, runny nose, sore throat, head and muscle pain, abdominal issues, diarrhea, cough, or fatigue without requiring hospitalization; moderate ( n  = 102), patients experiencing persistent daily cough and fever with worsening breathing difficulties requiring medical care in the hospital; and severe ( n  = 98), patients who required admission to the ICU due to severe acute respiratory syndrome with O2 saturation below 94.

Eligible participants were aged 18 or older, approximately 18 months post-COVID-19 diagnosis confirmed by a positive RT-PCR test for SARS-CoV-2, along with medical documentation detailing the treatment administered during the infection. Exclusion criteria included cognitive or neuropsychiatric deficits predating the COVID-19 outbreak. All participants who agreed to participate in the study signed an informed consent form before the assessment.

Demographic and clinical information

The battery of cognitive tests was organized based on data from the literature on attention, memory, and processing speed difficulties associated with COVID-19.

Intellectual quotient (IQ)

The Wechsler Abbreviated Intelligence Scale (WASI) [ 35 ] was used to assess the participants’ IQ, two subtests were used: (1) vocabulary, which assesses language development, semantic knowledge, and general intelligence (crystallized), and (2) matrix reasoning, assessing the visual perception of abstract stimuli (fluid intelligence). Higher scores indicate better performance.

Working memory

Digits Span - (DS) [ 36 ]. Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale III is a scale to assess verbal working memory in forward and backward formats. The total Digit Span raw score (total number of items/list correctly repeated) was based on the sum of the Digits Forward and Digits Backward raw score. Higher scores indicate better performance.

Processing speed

Coding Subtest - Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale III. [ 36 ]. It was used to assess processing speed, as well as the ability to follow instructions under time pressure, selective attention, concentration (resistance to distractibility), and motor persistence in a sequential task. Higher scores indicate better performance.

Sustained attention

The Sustained Attention Test (SA) assesses an individual’s ability to focus, select, and maintain attention on a specific target when facing simultaneous visual stimuli [ 37 ]. The test involves locating symbols presented among all symbols on the answer sheet based on three models presented over 2.30 min, standardized for the Brazilian population. Higher scores indicate better performance.

Visuo-constructive ability and visual-spatial memory

Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF) [ 38 ]. The ROCF is widely used to assess visuo-constructive ability (copy tests) and visual-spatial memory (recall tests, after 3 min of copying). The figure comprises 18 items that make up the whole figure. Items are scored from 0, 0.5, 1 or 2. Scores range from 0 to 36, reflecting accuracy and positioning of each item in the figure, with higher scores indicating better performance.

Depression, anxiety, and stress

Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale − 21 (DASS-21) [ 39 ]. The DASS-21 assesses anxiety, depression, and stress. This scale contains 21 items divided into three subscales and uses a 4-point Likert scale. Each subscale consists of seven items that assess symptoms related to depression, anxiety, and stress. It provides three scores (one for each subscale), the total sum of which ranges between 0 and 21. Higher scores on each scale correspond to more negative or severe affective states.

Recruitment was conducted through social networks and hospital patient lists, with 326 respondents contacted via email or WhatsApp. A meeting via an online platform was arranged to explain the study’s details and verify inclusion criteria. After the first meeting, 16 individuals had not responded to various scheduling attempts. Thus, only 310 eligible individuals agreed to participate. For the next stage, we scheduled an initial in-person session to collect sociodemographic and clinical information, age, sex, marital status, educational level, occupation, history of previous neurological or psychiatric disease, type of COVID-19 symptoms, type of treatment (ward or ICU), length of stay (days in the ward or ICU), number of relatives infected with COVID-19, number of relatives who passed away due to COVID-19, data from imaging tests, cognitive complaints, psychiatric complaints, current medications, and analysis of medical reports. Of the 310 eligible individuals, five were excluded for not presenting evidence of a positive RT-PCR result for SARS-CoV2, and three did not return for their psychological symptoms and cognitive assessment, resulting in a final sample of 302 participants. For each participant, a neuropsychological battery assessed intellectual quotient (IQ), sustained attention, working memory, visual memory, visual-constructive ability, processing speed, and depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms.

Statistical analysis

Data processing was conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 23 (IBM Corp., Sao Paulo, S.P., BRA). Raw scores for each variable were employed for analysis after confirming normality through Shapiro-Wilk tests. Regarding to IQ and cognitive difficulties (see Tables  1 and 2 ), it has been used Brazilian standardized scores.

Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) was performed, after verifying assumptions, to explore interactions between independent variables in predicting the dependent variables [ 40 ]. Consider a logistic regression model to predict the probability of clinical situation based on cognitive, clinical, and sociodemographic factors. The dependent variable is multinominal (1 for mild, 2 for moderate, and 3 for severe), and the independent variables are continuous. The general formula interaction term could be: log(P)= β 0 + β 1  ×  1 + β 2  ×  2 + ⋯ + β p X p + β p  + 1(X 1 ×X 2 )+ ⋯ + β p + q (X p ×X p + 1 ) which β p + 1 , β p + 2 …, β p + q are the interaction coefficients, and (X 1 ×X 2 ), (X p ×X p + 1 ), …, are the interaction terms between the variables. This term allows analyzing whether the effect of cognitive, clinical, and sociodemographic factors on the dependent variable varies according to clinical situation (mild, moderate, and severe) [ 41 ]. Effects of factors on the dependent variable were expressed as odds ratios (OR). A model was developed to explain the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. An OR of 1 signifies no effect on odds, OR > 1 denotes higher odds, and OR < 1 suggests lower odds. Regression coefficients estimated the increase in log odds with each unit increase in exposure. The exponential function of these coefficients provided the OR associated with a one-unit (one score point) increase in exposure [ 42 ].

After checking all assumptions, one-way multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) was used to determine whether there are any statistically significant differences between the adjusted means of three independent (unrelated) groups, while controlling for age. The effect size was assessed using Partial Eta square (η 2 ), with interpretations as follows: >0.01 = small effect, > 0.06 = medium effect, and > 0.14 = large effect [ 43 ].

We employed three nominal categories for independent variables (mild, moderate, and severe), 10 dependent continuous variables (five cognitive, three psychological, and two sociodemographic). Multicollinearity was not observed in the data, while the significance level was set at p  < 0.05.

Demographic results and clinical aspects

Socio-demographic data, IQ measurements, and clinical information of the 302 participants who recovered from COVID-19 were assessed at least 18 months after infection (see Table  1 ).

The participants were categorized according to disease severity, considering mild (not hospitalized), moderate (ward), and severe (intensive care unit) symptoms at least eighteen months after infection (Table  1 ). The sample comprised individuals, both male and female, with high educational levels and without cognitive complaints prior to contracting COVID-19. The total sample size was N  = 302 ( n  = 151 men , 50% and n  = 151 women , 50%). There were no IQ differences in the three groups.

Cognitive assessment and psychological aspects

Table  2 illustrates the distribution of participants across each group, analyzing cognitive difficulties (a lower score based on standardized) according to scores below the normative mean values in Brazil for each instrument used.

The data from Table  2 indicate higher percentages of cognitive difficulties in the severe group, followed by the moderate group, compared to the mild group. Notably, even within the mild group, 11% of participants exhibited difficulties in at least one assessed cognitive function 18 months after COVID-19 infection. No clinical signs of severe anxiety and stress were observed across the three groups.

The Multinomial Logistic Regression model fitting information showed an a-2 log-likelihood = 374.773, c 2  = 288.683, df  = 20, p  = 0.000, indicating an adequate predictor model. It was confirmed by the Pearson Goodness-of-Fit test (c 2  = 489.798, df  = 582, p  = 0.998). Pseudo R 2 estimates were calculated (Cox and Snell = 0.616, Nagelkerke = 0.693, and McFadden = 0.435). Thus, the variation in the groups might be explained by the full model, suggesting that the predictions were reliable. The model accurately predicted 73.5% of the cases in their respective groups. Specifically, 85.3% of the cases were correctly predicted as mild (not hospitalized) , while 57.8% and 77.6% of the cases were correctly predicted as moderate (ward) and severe (ICU) , respectively.

Table  3 presents the likelihood ratio tests conducted to assess the contribution of each variable effect to the model. For each one, a -2 log-likelihood was calculated for the reduced model, representing a model excluding the variable effect, that is, log-likelihood statistic was compared between model that either did or did not contain the variables to determine if the variables contributed significantly to the model. If the significance level of the test was < 0.05, the effect contributed to the model. Thus, processing speed, sustained attention, visual memory, working memory, depression, stress, and age, were observed to make comprehensive contributions to the model.

Table  4 shows the results of the MLR, which was used to predict the probabilities of different possible outcomes of a categorically distributed dependent variable, given a set of independent variables. This can explain the relationship between a nominal dependent variable and one or more independent variables. OR is a measure of how strongly an event is associated with exposure. Specifically, it quantifies the ratio between two sets of odds: the odds of an event occurring in an exposed group versus those in a non-exposed group. It aims to ascertain the likelihood of exposure leading to a specific event [ 44 ].

In reference to the mild (not hospitalized) group as the baseline, the MLR results (Table  4 ) indicate that a one-unit increase in processing speed, sustained attention, and working memory performance could potentially reduce the odds by 6%, 7%, and 18%, respectively, of being categorized in the ward group compared to the group that was not hospitalized. However, it does not mean that increasing cognitive performance protects against disease severity. When reading the odds results of this study, for example, in the above results, it might be inferred that patients in the ward group tend to have poorer cognitive performance than the not hospitalized group. High levels of depressive and stress symptoms suggested being categorized in ward group, in comparison to the group of individuals who were not hospitalized. The results demonstrate that for each incremental point in depression and stress scores, the odds ratio increased by 36% and 77%, respectively, for being categorized in the ward group, considering the non-hospitalized group as the reference. It also suggests that patients in the ward group tend to have higher depressive and stress symptoms than not hospitalized group. Age was also found to increase the odds by 90% of being categorized in the ward group. Similar associations were observed for age and depressive symptoms in the ICU group, with an increase in odds ratio by 92% for age and 30% for depression.

In addition to age and depressive symptoms explaining why some individuals were placed in the severe group, three cognitive variables also were predictors explained for this specific sample, showing a negative relationship: sustained attention, visual memory, working memory (see Table  4 ). This means that with each improved performance point, there could be a reduction in the odds ratio for being categorized in the ICU group by 20%, 24%, and 77%, respectively. These results point out patients in the ICU group tend to present poorer cognitive performance than not hospitalized group.

A One-Way Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) revealed a statistically significant distinction between the clinical groups (mild, moderate, and severe) concerning the combined cognitive variables, after controlling for age, F (16, 582) = 17.697, p  < 0.000, Wilks’ Λ = 0.453, partial η 2  = 0.327, indicating a large effect size. Upon analyzing p -value associated with the covariate ‘age’ on each dependent variable, the result was p  < 0.000 for all cognitive variables with partial η 2  > 0.14 (large effect), but with no significance for the clinical variables (depression, anxiety, and stress). On the other hand, after controlling for depressive symptoms, results presented no statistically significant changes ( p  = 0.165, partial η 2  > 0.14) between groups, regarding cognitive variables.

This study stems from an exploratory analysis that revealed original data on people’s cognitive effects after varying degrees of SARS-CoV-2 contamination (mild, moderate, and severe) and without a history of cognitive complaints.

We showed that cognitive symptoms persist in mild cases and are even more prevalent in individuals with severe manifestations. Furthermore, we confirmed our central hypothesis: people with severe forms of COVID-19 show diminished cognitive performance 18 months after infection compared to those with mild to moderate forms.

Although identifying cognitive difficulties in mild cases, as observed in this study, aligns with the existing literature, this paper presents specificities that set it apart from these investigations. For instance, a study comparing 50 COVID-19 individuals to 50 healthy controls using a computerized neuropsychological battery [ 18 ] reported deterioration in processing speed, attention, executive function, and working memory in 53% of clinical cases, persisting at least six weeks post-symptom onset. Though our study also detected attention and working memory issues (digit span), we did not observe problems in visual memory tasks using the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure. Additionally, we demonstrated a notably lower incidence rate of cognitive problems (12%). This discrepancy suggests that cognitive difficulties may diminish over time in milder cases. It’s noteworthy that Hammerle et al. [ 29 ] employed cognitive screening tests different from our protocol.

Regarding cognitive measures, it is noteworthy that performance in tasks involving processing speed, attention, working memory, and visuoconstructive ability varied across the three groups. The moderate group exhibited poorer performance than the mild group in these aspects, while the severe group demonstrated an even lower performance than the moderate group.

When contextualizing our findings within the existing literature, we observe that the most prevalent cognitive difficulties in the severe group align with other studies, associating disease severity with age [ 27 , 28 ], regardless of variations in the neuropsychological protocols. Notably, our study stands out as the first to analyze three severity groups simultaneously, providing a more comprehensive case perspective, distinct from previous studies.

Regarding cognitive aspects, performance in processing speed and working memory was similar between the moderate and severe groups in this study, both differing from the mild group. These findings suggest that, although all groups were affected by COVID-19, the effects on cognitive function may vary in intensity. However, it is crucial to highlight that the severity of symptoms and the post-COVID-19 cognitive impact can be influenced by various factors, such as age, hypoxia, and depressive symptoms [ 17 , 18 , 22 , 25 , 27 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 45 , 46 , 47 ]. While cognitive difficulties can vary from person to person, and other factors may influence these results, it is suggested that COVID-19 significantly contributes to mental challenges associated with long-term symptoms [ 2 , 7 , 8 , 10 , 12 , 15 , 16 , 18 , 19 , 26 , 34 , 48 ].

Another factor we observed in our study, in line with the current literature, is the incidence of depressive symptoms, particularly among COVID-19 hospitalized patients [ 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ]. We highlight that these symptoms were more prevalent in the severe cases group compared to moderate and mild cases. Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly elevated stress and anxiety levels in both the general population and in patients with more severe symptoms requiring hospitalization [ 26 , 28 , 36 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 ]. Depressive symptoms also might affect cognitive functioning, including attention, memory, processing speed, and decision-making [ 50 ]. However, in our study, even after controlling the depressive symptoms variable, there were no statistically significant changes in the cognitive variables. These results corroborate Cysique et al. [ 51 ] and Woo et al. [ 52 ] studies which showed cognitive impairments may manifest itself independently of depression after COVID-19 infection. Nevertheless, it is essential to consider mental health in conjunction with cognitive aspects when assessing the post-COVID-19 effects in both moderate and severe cases, as mentioned in the literature [ 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 53 , 54 ].

Better performance in processing speed, sustained attention, and working memory was associated to decreased odds of being categorized in the ward group compared to the mild group. Similarly, higher levels of depressive and stress symptoms were indicative of a higher likelihood of being categorized in the ward group. Exploring cognitive predictors within the severe group, our investigation identified sustained attention, visual memory, and working memory as pivotal factors, demonstrating a negative association with the ICU group. Improvements in these cognitive domains were correlated with a substantial reduction in the odds of being categorized in the ICU group.

We observed a significant association between depressive symptoms, age, and hospitalization groups. An increase in these symptoms translated into more than a third of a chance of belonging to the ward group. Our observations indicated a gradient of cognitive difficulties and depressive symptoms with lower occurrences in the mild group, increased occurrences in moderate cases, and a higher incidence in severe cases, as post-COVID consequences [ 18 , 55 , 56 ]. Furthermore, we emphasize that the presence of cognitive symptoms and other conditions are not only associated with severe cases of COVID-19 [ 5 , 32 ].

In addition to depressive symptoms, age was also an important variable. For example, each additional year of age was associated with a greater probability of belonging to the ward group, with the non-hospitalised group as the reference point. In the ICU group, both age and depressive symptoms exhibited similar patterns. Older Individuals were more likely to experience the severe form and more cognitive difficulties. A study review reported that adults over 65 represent 80% of hospitalisations and have a 23 times greater risk of death than younger people [ 27 ]. A post-hospitalization by COVID-19 study (between 5 and 12 months) with 2,320 individuals (mean age 58.7 ± 12.5 years) demonstrated that the mean age was higher (67.8 ± 11.4 years) among compromised patients [ 28 ].

Although age was highlighted, in this study, as a significant predictor of adverse outcomes in patients who were infected and hospitalized (ward and ICU) due to COVID-19, impacting cognitive variables, it is important to consider age in conjunction with other factors, such as preexisting health conditions, for a comprehensive understanding of its influence on disease severity.

These data highlight the importance of a more in-depth age analysis as a significant factor in developing post-COVID cognitive problems. The relationship between age and cognitive impact may reveal nuances, providing insights for prevention and intervention strategies. Understanding how different age groups face and recover from these cognitive difficulties might guide personalized treatments and targeted support programs, considering the specific needs of each age group. Furthermore, a detailed investigation into this factor might aid in early risk identification and the development of more effective preventive measures for vulnerable populations.

Crivelli et al. [ 13 ], in a meta-analysis of 27 studies (resulting from 6,202 articles analyzed), cognitively assessed 2,049 individuals with a mean age of 56.05 years up to seven months after COVID-19 infection. Through a regression analysis, the authors found that an increase in age correlates with enhanced cognitive disfunction. It is possible that the presence of depressive symptoms in the moderate and severe groups may also contribute as a variable enhancing cognitive difficulty.

Our findings provide empirical evidence regarding cognitive effects post-COVID-19, particularly in individuals experiencing severe disease manifestations. Moreover, our study has demonstrated the presence of cognitive difficulties in individuals infected with mild and moderate symptoms, emphasizing the intricate nature of factors associated with COVID-19, as underscored in the existing literature [ 8 , 10 , 13 , 15 , 18 , 19 , 26 , 29 , 33 , 49 ]. We also highlighted the need for a comprehensive, multidimensional approach in rehabilitation programs to address the enduring cognitive impacts of COVID-19.

Study limitations

While our study presents an analysis encompassing three post-COVID-19 patient groups—mild, moderate, and severe—and provides an overarching understanding of cognitive performance, several limitations must be acknowledged. Primarily, the study’s cross-sectional design restricts the establishment of causal relationships. The absence of control for asymptomatic individuals within the mild symptoms group also represents a limitation. Assessing this subgroup, alongside the inclusion of an uninfected control group, could offer provide a more specific overview of the situation. Moreover, our study did not explore the impact of cognitive deficits on participants’ day-to-day functionality. Investigating these aspects could yield essential insights beneficial for bolstering cognitive rehabilitation programs.

Our findings add additional empirical evidence toward understanding the long-term cognitive effects of COVID-19, particularly in individuals who experienced severe manifestations of the disease. Furthermore, we acknowledge the necessity for a multidimensional approach encompassing comprehensive investigation and assessment criteria as foundational elements for developing rehabilitation programs aimed at addressing the lasting cognitive repercussions of COVID-19.

Data availability

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to data confidentiality but can be provided by the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Editora Vetor for their collaboration on the attentional tests and express our appreciation to all the volunteers who participated in this study.

This study was funded by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP, State of São Paulo Research Foundation), grant number 2020/07957-2.

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Antonio de Pádua Serafim, Mariana Medeiros Assed & Ricardo S. S. Durães

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Fabiana Saffi, Amanda Rafaella A. Soares, Alessandra Mara Morita & Cristiana C. A. Rocca

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Antonio Serafim, Ricardo Durães, Fabiana Saffi, and Cristiana Rocca designed the study. Antonio Serafim, Fabiana Saffi, Amanda Soares, Sandro de Toledo, Mariana Assed, and Alessandra Morita were involved in data collection and/or supported data collection. Antonio Serafim, Cristiana Rocca, Ricardo Durães, and Fabiana Saffi authored the main manuscript text, prepared the reference list, and developed the tables. Ricardo Durães and Antonio Serafim analyzed and interpreted the data. Ricardo Durães and Antonio Serafim. supervised the study. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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de Pádua Serafim, A., Saffi, F., Soares, A.R.A. et al. Cognitive performance of post-covid patients in mild, moderate, and severe clinical situations. BMC Psychol 12 , 236 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-01740-7

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What Your Life Experiences Can Do for Your Brain

New research shows the benefits a long life can do for your thinking..

Posted April 30, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• The view that aging is associated with cognitive decline permeates the media.
• Findings from a 2017 study plus new data on brain aging show that learning can take place throughout life.
• Focus on your physical health and seeking out new experiences to keep your mind sharp, no matter your age.

The idea of getting older often leaves people uncertain about what to expect, especially when it comes to holding onto their mental acuity. These worries are only made worse by the racket in the media about the aging of the minds of political leaders. Despite the evidence to the contrary, it’s common to fear the prospect of getting old and losing one’s wits.

This evidence to the contrary often appears in scientific articles, but may not make it to the popular press. For example, since the early 2000s (at least), researchers in the field have pointed to the possibility of plasticity, both in the brain and in cognitive functioning. This evidence also includes the idea of “cognitive reserve,” the existence of a repository of both neurons and information that people acquire over their lifetimes. Like a bank, people can dip into this reserve to balance out losses that might occur due to normal aging or changes in the brain associated with chronic diseases.

Why, then, is this good news about aging so often dismissed? It’s extremely hard to overcome not just decades but centuries of looking at later life as a miserable period of existence (Shakespeare’s line- “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything”). However, with the aging of the population, this perspective is more important to keep in mind than ever. It can also provide individuals with hope about their own personal futures.

Modeling the Aging Mind

One of the most compelling arguments in favor of plasticity comes from a 2014 article by University of Tübingen Michael Ramscar and colleagues. Using computer modeling to simulate the amount of information the aging brain has acquired, the authors showed that if you stuff a computer with as much knowledge as people accumulate through life, such as names and facts, a computer will take as long and make as many retrieval errors as research on live subjects tends to produce. Think of how much new information you pick up every day, whether through a chat with a friend or by watching an episode of "Jeopardy!" on TV. Sorting through all of this could definitely take time and potentially be error-prone.

In a more recent article also using computer simulation, Ramscar and his associates (2017) conducted a similar investigation. This time, they were interested in finding out whether the adage “Old dogs can’t learn new tricks” could also be turned on its head.

The target in the 2017 article was the learning of “paired associates” (PAL). In a typical PAL experiment, participants must form associations between pairs of unrelated words across multiple trials. As Ramscar et al. report from prior research, the largest age differences in this ability occur not in later adulthood, but between the ages of 20 and 40 years. This seemingly preposterous result, the authors note, “cannot be construed as evidence of significant cognitive decline between the ages of 20 and 40 years.” Something else must be going on.

The authors suspected that PAL may be affected by the need, early in adulthood, to focus on learning experiences that make sense, not those that are randomly presented in a lab. To test this possibility, the authors compared the performance of native versus nonnative speakers ranging between the ages of 18-28 and 39-53 years. The monolinguals completed the PAL in their native language (German) and the bilinguals in two (Mandarin Chinese and German).

The findings supported the predictions that having a proper assessment of cognitive performance in healthy aging cannot be made unless the knowledge and skills that are inevitably accumulated as experience grows are controlled for. Older adults performed better in their second than in their first language except in the very hardest word pairs. The people who performed worse, furthermore, were those with advanced educational degrees, reflecting their greater exposure to language compared to individuals whose livings weren’t made through extensive reading. It’s worth pointing out that by “older,” the authors are including people in their 40s—again, those over the age shown in previous research to suffer PAL deficits.

As the authors concluded, their findings support the interpretation that, much as in the cramming of information in life that affects memory , a “well-discriminated lexical knowledge base” can create a “PAL cost.”

Putting these findings into perspective, Ramscar et al. further go on to note that “a proper assessment of cognitive performance in healthy aging cannot be made unless the knowledge and skills that are inevitably accumulated as experience grows are controlled for,” and, what’s more, scientific prudence further indicates that current beliefs about the supposed deterioration of cognitive faculties across the life span ought to be seriously questioned.”

The Brain’s Role in Continued Learning Potential With Age

This one study, though compelling, might not satisfy your need to be shown the counter-evidence about aging and decline. However, two 2024 studies of brain aging provide a complementary set of findings that augment the Ramscar et al. studies.

Underlying the cognitive abilities needed to learn and remember is the brain’s facility to coordinate incoming information and integrate it with the knowledge people already have. These processes require brain regions to communicate with each other, functions performed by the tracts of white matter, which, like insulated electric lines, shoot signals back and forth. The more extensive the white matter, the more efficiently these signals are both sent and received.

Research from two recent studies investigating the integrity of the brain’s white matter among older adults shows positive roles for both education and lifestyle. More years of education could trip an older individual up when having to learn nonsense lists of word pairs, as Ramscar et al. showed. However, according to University of Granada’s Tibor Stöffel and colleagues (2024), individuals with more education can avoid what would otherwise be a loss of this all-important functional connectivity.

In the second study by UNSW Sydney’s Jing Du and colleagues (2024), data were provided from more than 37,000 individuals in the U.K. Biobank Study. The “brain age” of white matter in these participants could be predicted by the presence of hypertension and diabetes. Their brain age, further, significantly predicted their performance on both speed of cognitive processing and ability to use the higher-order so-called “ executive functions " of planning and decision-making .

To sum up, the growing body of data shows that later adulthood need not be a time of cognitive decline. Identifying modifiable risk factors and sources of plasticity will remain a goal of cognitive science and aging. As this knowledge trickles out to the public at large, there may be a time when the focus becomes not on what people lose but on what they can gain as the years go by.

Jin, Y., Lin, L., Xiong, M., Sun, S., & Wu, S. (2023). Moderating effects of cognitive reserve on the relationship between brain structure and cognitive abilities in middle-aged and older adults. Neurobiology of Aging , 128 , 49–64. doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2023.04.003

Du, J., Pan, Y., Jiang, J., Lam, B. C. P., Thalamuthu, A., Chen, R., Tsang, I. W., Sachdev, P. S., & Wen, W. (2024). White matter brain age as a biomarker of cerebrovascular burden in the ageing brain. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience . https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-024-01758-3

Stöffel, T., Vaqué-Alcázar, L., Bartrés-Faz, D., Peró-Cebollero, M., Cañete-Massé, C., & Guàrdia-Olmos, J. (2024). Reduced default mode network effective connectivity in healthy aging is modulated by years of education. NeuroImage, 288, 120532. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2024.120532

Ramscar, M., Sun, C. C., Hendrix, P., & Baayen, H. (2017). The mismeasurement of mind: Life-span changes in paired-associate-learning scores reflect the 'cost' of learning, not cognitive decline. Psychological Science, 28(8), 1171–1179. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617706393

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Compassion Fatigue as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Believing Compassion Is Limited Increases Fatigue and Decreases Compassion Izzy Gainsburg and Julia Lee Cunningham  

Compassion has health and well-being benefits for the self and others. Unfortunately, people sometimes experience compassion fatigue—a decreased ability to feel compassion—when they are repeatedly exposed to people suffering. Thus, the present research explores a factor that can mitigate compassion fatigue: changing people’s compassion mindsets. Our research suggests that when people believe compassion is fatiguing and a limited resource, they experience more compassion fatigue and provide lower-quality social support; however, when people believe compassion is energizing and not limited, they feel less compassion fatigue and provide higher-quality social support. We also show that people can change their limited-compassion mindsets and become less susceptible to compassion fatigue. Altogether, this research cautions people against assuming they will experience compassion fatigue and to allow for the possibility that compassion for someone in need can be an energizing experience that motivates people to care about others in need, too. 

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Imagine trying to describe a favorite memory to a friend. The mental image is not as defined or strong as the original experience, right? Our research delved into this phenomenon, showing that the process of mental imagery and visual perception are quite different. When we imagine something, we create a sort of picture in our mind, but without the sensory input that comes from the eyes. To help create this mental picture, our brain employs a clever strategy: It dims the activity related to elements we do not imagine, rather like turning down the background noise to focus on a conversation. This paradigm shift in our understanding might explain why mental imagery is seldom experienced as richly as perception and may put an upper limit to its strength. 

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Humor has typically been shown to promote attraction and is highly desired by potential mates, but the day-to-day unfolding of how humor affects relationship maintenance has rarely been examined. In this research, we tested whether relationship quality on a daily basis precedes humor or the other way around, using a sample of college students in Singapore. We found consistent evidence that individuals engaged in humorous interactions to the extent that they reported greater relationship quality on the previous day, but not the other way around. These findings enhance our understanding of the role of humor in relationship maintenance and highlight the importance of examining bidirectional processes between relationship quality and humor in interpersonal interactions.  

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EDITORIAL article

Editorial: highlights in psychology: social anxiety.

• 1 Baltic Film, Media and Arts School, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia
• 2 Department of Medicine and Surgery, University of Milano Bicocca, Monza, Italy

Editorial on the Research Topic Highlights in psychology: social anxiety

The aim of the Research Topic is to provide a comprehensive overview of the current research landscape surrounding social anxiety. Social anxiety is a pervasive mental health condition characterized by intense fear and discomfort in social situations, often leading to significant impairment in various areas of life such as relationships, work, and school.

Through this edition, the goal is to shed light on various aspects of social anxiety, including its cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, and cultural dimensions. The Research Topic seeks to showcase a diverse range of research methodologies and perspectives within the field of psychology, encompassing disciplines such as Personality and Social Psychology, Clinical Psychology, and Cognition.

The Research Topic delves into various specific themes, spanning errors in cognition like hypermentalizing and their correlation with social anxiety, along with exploring the repercussions of social anxiety on diverse relationship dynamics encompassing familial, romantic, professional, and platonic spheres. Additionally, it scrutinizes the comorbidity nexus between social anxiety and other mental health afflictions like depression and eating disorders, whilst also examining social anxiety across age demographics, from children to adolescents and young adults. The discourse extends to encompass assessment and treatment methodologies tailored for social anxiety, considering cultural dimensions including prevalence, manifestation, and treatment paradigms across different societies. Moreover, it investigates gender disparities and cultural influences on social anxiety, underlining the role of sociocultural factors in its formulation. Furthermore, it elucidates the intricate interplay between emotions, notably shame, and social anxiety, alongside delving into the neurobiological and psychophysiological underpinnings of this phenomenon.

The Research Topic contributes to our understanding of social anxiety and provide insights that can inform both theory and practice in psychology. This Research Topic includes articles that focus on social anxiety, demonstrating the wide range of research conducted in the field of Psychology, including areas such as Personality and Social Psychology, Clinical Psychology, and Cognition. Key conclusions drawn from the articles include the interdisciplinary nature of studying social anxiety, the introduction of concepts like “Alexinomia”, and the exploration of its relationships with other psychological factors such as olfactory reference disorder and childhood maltreatment. The role of personality traits, cultural influences, and technological advancements like social media are also highlighted, alongside the impact of current events such as the COVID-19 pandemic on social anxiety.

Articles within this Research Topic use methodologies from Personality and Social Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Cognition, and other related fields, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of studying social anxiety. Several articles delve into the relationship between social anxiety and other disorders or conditions, such as olfactory reference disorder, childhood maltreatment, substance use disorders, and cognitive processing differences. This highlights the importance of understanding how social anxiety interacts with and may be influenced by other psychological factors.

The interplay between personality traits and social anxiety is a recurring theme, emphasizing the significance of individual differences in shaping the experience and expression of social anxiety. Cultural influences, such as self-construals among Chinese individuals, and technological advancements, such as social media use, are shown to have implications for social anxiety. These findings underscore the importance of considering cultural and technological contexts in understanding and addressing social anxiety.

Current events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can have significant implications for social anxiety and related behaviors. Understanding how contextual factors influence social anxiety is crucial for developing effective interventions and treatments. The exploration of therapeutic approaches, such as dialectical behavior therapy skills groups, suggests promising avenues for intervention in treating social anxiety disorder. Identifying effective treatment modalities is essential for improving outcomes for individuals with social anxiety.

This collection of articles enhances our comprehension of social anxiety across various domains, from its underlying mechanisms to its impact on individuals' lives, and explores potential avenues for intervention and treatment. Articles explore various aspects of social anxiety, including its interaction with different disorders, cognitive processes, technological influences, and cultural contexts. They also propose therapeutic approaches such as dialectical behavior therapy skills groups, aiming to improve interventions and treatments for social anxiety disorder. Each article contributes uniquely to the growing body of knowledge, shedding light on different aspects such as cognitive processing, cultural influences, therapeutic interventions, and the interplay with other psychological factors.

Ditye et al. introduce the concept of a specific fear related to social interaction.

Reuter et al. explore the relationship between specific disorders or conditions and social anxiety.

Okano and Nomura move into examining specific aspects of social anxiety and its interaction with other psychological factors.

Macovei et al. continue exploring the interplay between personality traits and social anxiety.

Liu et al. expand the discussion to include the influence of childhood experiences, cultural factors, and substance use disorders on social anxiety.

Zhu et al. shift focus to how social anxiety affects cognitive processes, particularly in interpreting non-verbal cues.

Yang et al. examine the relationship between social media use and social anxiety, adding a technological and cultural dimension to the discussion.

Thériault et al. explore the impact of social expectations and feedback on individuals with social anxiety.

Bagheri et al. offer a data-driven approach to understanding social dysfunction and its predictors, adding empirical evidence to the discussion.

Xia et al. consider the impact of current events (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) on social anxiety and related behaviors, incorporating relevant contextual factors.

Villalongo Andino et al. conclude by exploring potential therapeutic approaches for addressing social anxiety, suggesting avenues for intervention and treatment.

To conclude, the Research Topic deepens our understanding of social anxiety across multiple domains, offering insights into its mechanisms, impact on individuals' lives, and potential avenues for intervention and treatment.

Author contributions

AZ: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing. AD: Writing—review & editing.

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all authors who contributed to the research on the topic of Social Anxiety, all reviewers who added their efforts to improve the studies, and to Frontiers for their support.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Keywords: social anxiety (SA), cognition, relationships, mental health, depression, cultural differences, emotions, neurobiology

Citation: Zabrodskaja A and Dakanalis A (2024) Editorial: Highlights in psychology: social anxiety. Front. Psychol. 15:1404923. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1404923

Received: 21 March 2024; Accepted: 15 April 2024; Published: 26 April 2024.

Edited and reviewed by: Gerald Matthews , George Mason University, United States

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*Correspondence: Anastassia Zabrodskaja, anastassia.zabrodskaja@gmail.com

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Exploring consumers’ adoption and recommendation in smart retailing: a cognitive absorption perspective

• Published: 30 April 2024

Cite this article

• Lingbo Tan 1 , 2 ,
• Chenxue Ren 1 ,
• Youya Zhan 1 ,
• Yu-Wei Chang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4233-4706 3 ,
• Jiahe Chen 4 &
• Ming-Chia Hsu 5  

Because of the rapid development of the Internet of Things, the business mode of the retail industry has changed tremendously. Smart retail is increasingly receiving academic attention. However, research on smart retail has mainly focused on shopping utility and consumers’ interactions with smart technology rather than consumers’ perceptions and feelings regarding smart technology. In order to fill this void, this paper incorporates perceptions (i.e., cognitive absorption) into the technology acceptance model to investigate consumer intention in smart retail. In total, 322 consumers with experience using smart retail technology are surveyed, and SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) is used for analysis. According to the findings, cognitive absorption has a considerable influence on consumers’ perception of the usefulness and ease of use of smart retail technology, which, in turn, affects consumer adoption and recommendation intentions on this smart technology. Theoretical and practical recommendations are made, as well as future research directions.

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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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This research was supported by the General Project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (21BJY032) and the Research Project of National Science and Technology Council (Taiwan) (112-2410-H-025-006) for funding.

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Lingbo Tan, Yu-wei Chang, Jiahe Chen, and Ming-Chia Hsu. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Chenxue Ren and Youya Zhan. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Tan, L., Ren, C., Zhan, Y. et al. Exploring consumers’ adoption and recommendation in smart retailing: a cognitive absorption perspective. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06042-0

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Why choose a Psychology Conversion masters degree at Middlesex University?

This course is accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS) which means you'll gain Graduate Basis of Chartered Membership once you successfully complete this master's course.

If you want to start a career in psychology and/or acquire the Graduate basis for Chartered Membership of the British Psychological Society, this course is for you.

You may have a degree in another subject but wish to change career or pursue your interest in psychology in more depth. We will teach you a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches and encourage you to develop a critical approach to studies, evaluating theory and evidence.

We have been teaching Psychology for over 50 years and are one of the largest providers of Psychology education in the UK.

What you will gain

By the end of this course, you will be able to perform quantitative and qualitative data analyses and use statistical software to analyse complex data. You will design, implement, analyse and communicate independent and group project work to an advanced level culminating in a dissertation on an agreed topic. You will also be able to design and run experiments to gather and interpret data. You will have gained knowledge in the core areas in psychology and be able to apply research skills across domains.

You will learn using cutting-edge facilities including fully equipped lecture theatres and tutorial spaces, a psychophysiology laboratory, social observation laboratories, an auditory cognition laboratory, and testing cubicles.

Accreditations

Our course is accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS) . This accreditation means that successfully completing the graduate course with an average of 50% or better confers the Graduate Basis for Chartered (GBC) Membership with the BPS.

The BPS is a professional body of graduates, many of whom work as psychologists and the main aim of the association is to maintain high standards in the discipline. Some of the benefits of being eligible to become a member of the BPS include being able to join special interest sections and divisions of the BPS (e.g. Developmental Section, Cognitive Section, etc.) receiving The Psychologist house journal and appointments memorandum, as well as being able to order books and journals at special reduced rates.

After completion of our course, many students go on to study in a more specialised area in psychology. A BPS-recognised degree is often a necessary first step for those who wish to pursue further training and careers in particular areas of psychology such as Clinical, Counselling, Educational, Forensic, Health & Occupational Psychology and for those wanting to obtain chartered status as a practicing psychologist.

3 great reasons to pick this course

Use specialist facilities and equipment.

Use our state-of-the-art facilities and specialist equipment include a psychophysiology laboratory, social observation laboratories, an auditory cognition laboratory, and testing cubicles

BPS accredited course

This course is accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS), so you’ll gain Graduate Basis for Chartered (GBC) membership

International Research

Our academics are regularly and widely published, and 95% of our research is internationally recognised.

You will learn cognitive skills through class discussion, guided independent study and lecturer feedback, as well as learning practical skills through presenting your ideas in written and oral form along with participation in practical exercises.

You will gain an in-depth understanding of your subject through participation in teaching sessions and independent research, with tutor support. Your learning will also be supported with online self-study materials.

Here is a brief overview of what you will study each year

Social, Personality & Developmental (30 credits)

This BPS core module aims to develop your expertise and mastery of primary and contemporary theory and research in three essential areas: social psychology, developmental psychology and individual differences.

The subject matter is introduced and investigated through topic-focused lectures and augmented with advanced research workshops. A focus on developmental psychology will see you study the biological, social, emotional and cognitive processes and changes of infancy and childhood as these are the periods during an individual's lifespan when the most change occurs.

In social psychology, interpersonal and intergroup processes will be studied with the objective of developing your understanding of the social dimension to human psychology. Throughout the module, several aspects of psychological approaches to understanding individual differences will be considered such as humanistic theories of development and social learning theory.

Research: Practice and Reporting (60 credits)

This module aim to provide you with an opportunity for an in-depth, advanced study in a specific area of applied psychology, pertinent to the degree for which you are registered, guided by, but largely independent of, tutor support. You will apply appropriate principles of empirical research, and present your research study in the form of a written journal article, using appropriate styles and conventions.

Research Methods (30 credits)

This module conforms with the statistics and methodology requirements of the British Psychological Society’s Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership (GBC). The module enables you to understand & critically evaluate psychological research & to understand how research design relates to research questions. It provides you with advanced skills in a variety of statistical analyses and enables them to conduct ethical psychological research at masters level utilising quantitative and qualitative methods. It provides skills in interpretation & critical discussion of published psychological research. It prepares you for your dissertation and enables you to choose appropriate methodologies and analyses for research.

Research and Issues in Applied Psychology (30 credits)

The aim of the module is to provide an intellectual setting within which you can both develop a fuller appreciation of substantive areas of applied psychology and improve their practical and analytical skills. The main aim is to direct you to develop an appreciation of the controversies and issues related to traditional and contemporary research, ethical issues, and up-to-date knowledge in the domain of applied psychology such as neuropsychology, infertility, sports and exercise and literacy acquisition.

Brain, Body and Mind (30 credits)

The module will give you an overview of biological and cognitive psychology as well as an introduction to the biological basis of heritable traits. The anatomy and physiology of the nervous system is considered; attention is focused on aspects of behaviour that have a clear biological component, with an emphasis on individual differences in biology. Through a series of psychophysiology lab sessions you will investigate specific central and peripheral nervous system variables and their relation to behaviour and individual differences. The cognitivist approach to psychology will be outlined and key theories relating to major cognitive faculties explored. Understanding of these is enhanced through a series of interactive seminars, consisting of group problem-solving activities. Both cognitive and biological approaches will explore pathology and neuropsychological case studies.

To find out more about this course, please download the Psychology Conversion MSc specification (PDF) .

Sign up now to receive more information about studying at Middlesex University London.

You'll be taught by an experienced teaching team with a wide range of expertise and professional experience.

How we'll teach you

Coursework and assessments.

You will participate in practical sessions, lectures, seminars and workshops, where you will take part in class discussions, and work on research projects, group assignments and critical analyses. Teaching is in person, on campus and supplemented with bespoke online resources. You will also be expected to engage in independent study and tutorial support is available for all modules.

The MSc can be studied over 12 months full-time or 24 months part-time. Part-time students take 60 taught credits and start their dissertation in year 1 and 60 taught credits and complete their dissertation in year 2.

The course is assessed at 180 credit points. Each 30-credit module represents approximately 300 hours of student study time, with two-four hours of contact time per week. The postgraduate dissertation module is 60 credits and encourages students to work independently, develop expertise in a particular area of psychology and demonstrate advanced research skills.

For two of the taught modules, some lecture content will be taught along with our undergraduate students. All modules include small group teaching sessions which are specifically designed and exclusive for the MSc Psychology conversion students. Staff are also available for individual tutorials. You will supplement all this with your own independent study and will submit a dissertation. There is a specific module on research methods for conversion students and the course also aims to improve your analytical, statistical and IT skills.

Where will I study?

You'll be based at our Hendon campus, north London.

Whether you are studying full or part-time – your course timetable will balance your study commitments on campus with time for work, life commitments and independent study.

We aim to make timetables available to students at least 2 weeks before the start of term. Some weeks are different due to how we schedule classes and arrange on-campus sessions.

Teaching vs independent study

In a typical year, you’ll spend about 1200 hours on your course.

Outside of teaching hours, you’ll learn independently through reading articles and books, working on projects, undertaking research, and preparing for assessments including coursework and presentations.

Typical weekly breakdown

The table below gives you an idea of what learning looks like across a typical week. Some weeks are different due to how we schedule classes and arrange on-campus sessions.

You'll receive full information on your teaching before you start your course. 

A typical week looks like this:

Learning terms

On-campus: This includes tutor-led sessions such as seminars, lab sessions and demonstrations as well as student-led sessions for work in small groups.

Online learning: This is teaching that is delivered online using tools like Skype or Zoom, as well as work that you do yourself using online teaching resources.

Independent study: This is the work you do in your own time including reading and research.

Part-time study

You can also study this course part-time.

Academic support

We have a strong support network online and on campus to help you develop your academic skills. We offer one-to-one and group sessions to develop your learning skills together with academic support from our library, IT teams and learning experts.

A wide variety of assessment methods are employed on the course including laboratory reports, essays, poster presentations, other written assignments and practical tests.

A major part of your assessment will be your 7,000 to 10,000-word report in the style of a journal article. We will be looking, among other things, at your ability to look critically at both theory and empirical research, and material from different sources.

You will receive regular feedback on your work.

North London campus

Our north London campus is 23 minutes away by underground train, travelling from London Kings Cross.

Our Sheppard Library provides a wide range of resources and support to help you to succeed in your studies.

Over 1,000 study spaces including rooms for group study and over 500 computers available.

We have one of London's biggest and best university campuses with everything you need in one place.

Student support.

We offer lots of support to help you while you're studying including financial advice, wellbeing, mental health, and disability support.

Additional needs

We'll support you if you have additional needs such as sensory impairment or dyslexia. And if you want to find out whether Middlesex is the right place for you before you apply, get in touch with our Disability and Dyslexia team .

Our specialist teams will support your mental health. We have free individual counselling sessions, workshops, support groups and useful guides.

Work while you study

Our Middlesex Unitemps branch will help you find work that fits around uni and your other commitments. We have hundreds of student jobs on campus that pay the London Living Wage and above. Visit the Middlesex Unitemps page.

• International entry
• How to apply

We welcome your application regardless of your background or experience.

For this course, we are looking for these minimum qualifications:

• 2:1. but applicants who have a 2:2 with high module grades may be considered
• Other relevant qualifications equivalent to an honours degree
• Three years' relevant work experience and the ability to study at postgraduate level.

If you have relevant qualifications , we may be able to count this towards your entry requirements.

We welcome students from the UK, EU and all over the world. Join students from over 122 countries and discover why so many international students call our campus home:

Quality teaching with top facilities plus flexible online learning

Welcoming north London campus that's only 30 minutes from central London

Work placements and networking with top London employers

Career support to get you where you want to go after university.

Qualifications

Here are our requirements for this course:

If you have relevant qualifications or work experience , we may be able to count this towards your entry requirements.

English language

You'll need good English language skills to study with us. Find out more about our English language requirements. And, don’t worry If you don't meet our minimum English language requirements, as we offer an intensive pre-sessional English course .

To study with us in the UK, you will need a Student Route visa .

Apply as early as possible to make sure you get a place. You can submit your application before you receive your final qualification.

Personal statements

Make sure that you highlight your best qualities in your personal statement that are relevant to this course, such as your ability to be forward-thinking, creative and collaborative.

We'll invite you to attend an online interview. Visit our interview tips page for advice.

Find out how to apply for postgraduate taught courses and watch our step-by-step video.

How can the Psychological Therapies and Interventions MSc/PGDip support your career?

Our postgraduate courses have been recognised for their ability to support your career.

95% of our postgraduate students go on to work or further study – Graduate Outcomes, 2022

Career paths

There are excellent employment prospects for Psychology graduates. The range of professional skills that you will develop ensures that you are highly valued across the economy. You could progress into a successful career as a counsellor, social worker, teacher or academic, or pursue careers in areas such as law, business management or education.

Many of our graduates pursue further education in more specialised areas in psychology including clinical, forensic, health, educational and occupational psychology and our BPS-recognised degree facilitates this. Others have pursued careers in research and academia.

MDXworks, our employability service, will help you make the most of your experience and connections to achieve your career goals. You'll have unlimited access to one-to-one advice and support from specialists in your sector plus 24/7 online support. You can also make the most of events and networking opportunities, on and off campus.

Global alumni network

You’ll be studying with students from 122 countries who’ll become part of your personal global network. You'll learn how to work with a global mindset and make invaluable connections on your course for your chosen industry.

Fees and funding

The fees below are for the 2024/25 academic year.

UK students 1

Full-time students: £10,500

Part-time students: £70 per credit

Part-time students: £35 per dissertation credit

International students 2

Full-time students: £16,800

Part-time students: £112 per credit

Part-time students: £56 per dissertation credit

Additional costs

We cover your costs for the day-to-day things that you need to do well in your studies.

• Free – laptop loans, Wi-Fi and printing
• Free specialist software for your course
• Free online training with LinkedIn Learning

The following course-related costs are not included in the fees, and you will need to budget for these:

• The cost of course-related books you may wish to purchase

Financial support

We offer lots of support to help you with fees and living costs. Check out our guide to student life on a budget and find out more about postgraduate funding .

Postgraduate scholarships

You may be eligible for one of our scholarships including:

• The Alumni Postgraduate Award – for all UK/EU Middlesex alumni a 20% fee reduction
• The Commonwealth Scholarship – full course fees, airfares and a living allowance
• The Chevening Scholarship – full course fees
• The European Academic Awards – £1000 to £7000 for students showing academic excellence
• Regional or International Merit Award – up to £2,000 towards course fees

For international students, we also have a limited number of other awards specific to certain regions, and work in partnership with funding providers in your country to help support you financially with your study.

Find out more about our postgraduate scholarships .

Help from your employer

Your employer can contribute towards the cost of your postgraduate study as part of their staff development programme.

Fees disclaimers

1. UK fees: The university reserves the right to increase postgraduate tuition fees in line with changes to legislation, regulation and any government guidance or decisions. The tuition fees for part-time UK study are subject to annual review and we reserve the right to increase the fees each academic year by no more than the level of inflation.

2. International fees: Tuition fees are subject to annual review and we reserve the right to increase the fees each academic year by no more than the level of inflation.

Any annual increase in tuition fees as provided for above will be notified to students at the earliest opportunity in advance of the academic year to which any applicable inflationary rise may apply.

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We’ll carefully manage any future changes to courses, or the support and other services available to you, if these are necessary because of things like changes to government health and safety advice, or any changes to the law.

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