FURTHER PSYCHOLOGICAL FIELDS
Psychological research has since come to be divided into several other major fields, such as cognitive, abnormal, social, and developmental
psychology. These fields and their subdivisions are discussed separately below.
Cognitive Psychology
Among the first issues that excited the interest of
psychologists in the early decades of the discipline were
perception, memory, and language. How do people come to interpret sights and sounds as meaningful objects and events? How do people store evidence about what has happened in order to remember the past? How is speech acquired? These questions are still alive in psychology, and, together with inquiries about imagery and
thinking, they make up the broad
FIELD called cognitive psychology. The field as a whole is discussed in the article cognitive psychology, and the separate component areas are outlined below.
Perception
Studies in perception investigate visual illusions, the recognition of depth and color, and, increasingly, the ways people put information together to make sense out of what they experience. Adult humans are able to move through a rich and complicated world of sensations and impressions; perceptual psychology examines how people group, categorize, and organize all the evidence their senses deliver. Greater detail can be found in the following
articles: perception; illusions; senses and sensation; and color perception.
Memory
The workings of the memory are akin to both perception and thinking. Research has demonstrated that people have several systems of memory: a short-term memory that holds images of sight and sound just long enough for people to see properly and to hear; a slightly longer-term memory that permits, for example, the storage of telephone numbers long enough to get them dialed; and a long-term memory that seems to hold the past almost indefinitely. Psychologists who
study memory tackle the mechanisms of memory encoding and retrieval in all three forms.
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics, a significant segment of cognitive psychology, stretches from formal linguistics to social psychology. The articles speech development and psycholinguistics explore how language is acquired, used, and related to thinking and action.
Thinking
Cognitive psychologists study thinking from several points of view. Some investigators carry out experiments on problem solving, the making of inferences, and the use of analogies in thought; others examine real-life thought in games such as chess or in the making of complex decisions. Further information can be found in the articles problem solving, reasoning, and concept formation and attainment. An exciting recent development in the study of thinking has been the attempt to mimic or simulate human thought with computer programs. The articles artificial intelligence and pattern recognition address this line of investigation.
Imagery
After long neglect, imagery is a bright field in contemporary psychology. Researchers are studying imagery and creativity, fantasy, dreamsÑeven the place of television in children's imagination. See the articles dreams and dreaming, fantasy, and nightmares.
Abnormal Psychology
The study of abnormal behavior is a branch of personality psychology, and it is perhaps the kind of psychology that most often finds its way into the popular press, television, and imagination. Abnormal psychology includes the diagnosis of mental malfunction, often with tests of assorted kinds; the systematic description or taxonomy of abnormal behavior; and the study of the effectiveness of psychological and pharmacological therapies. The study of abnormal psychology, described in psychopathology, touches closely on the applied field of clinical psychology.
Social Psychology
When a human being enters into an exchange with another human being, this interaction is a candidate for study in social psychology. Social psychologists study the normal, everyday actions of peoleÑthe developing social skills of children, for instanceÑas well as reactions to extraordinary events. For an outline of the field, see the article on social psychology.
Developmental Psychology
The "general practitioners" of psychology, developmental psychologists study all aspects of behavior as it changes from birth to old age. The developmental psychology article introduces the field; the following articles give additional information: infancy; speech development; child development; play (in behavior); sexual development; adolescence; middle age; and geriatrics. The work of developmental psychologists borders on the applied fields of educational and school psychology covered below.
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