Cognitive Psychology: What are the effects on our daily life?

Psychology has a great place and importance in our daily lives. It helps us to understand and interpret our environment, to make sense of ourselves and events, and to provide foresight. Only psychologists do not try to understand human behavior. In everyday life, we try to understand the relationships between emotions, thoughts and behaviors, how we do what, why and how even others and even ourselves. There are many areas of psychology, one of them is cognitive psychology and daily life largely involves cognition and involves several cognitive processes that work simultaneously or very recently. According to Tahir (2014), cognition is a term used to illustrate mental processes such as perception, memory and data processing that enables the individual to obtain information, analyze complications and make plans for the futurity. People think, plan, decide based on the information they remember and make a selective distinction between the stimuli that require attention. The expression cognition relates to whole procedures in which emotional influxs are altered, decreased, reconsidered, store up and expended. Clearly, cognition includes everything people can act, and each psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon.(Neisser, 1967). Also, cognition include mental process, higher mental process and difference degree of control and automaticity.(Ögel Balaban, 2018). The purpose of this article is to explain the effects and role of cognitive psychology in our daily lives with examples.
Cognitive psychology examine human perception and design processes in the external world, while as well analyzing the convert of creating action according to these designs. Cognitive psychology is concerned with the process of adapting to the world through mental processes such as perception, learning, remembering, thinking, and imagining and the process of creating actions to change the world. For instance, cognitive psychology affects our attention. If we describe the regard briefly, our cognitive processing combinations are occasionally overburdened and we require to select information to process more. This deals with how and why performance advances with attention. According to research by Bonneau (2018), the 'Cocktail Party' effect describes a phenomenon that occurs when focusing on a single auditory stimulus between multiple sources of noise. When the focus is applied, everything outside the focus range is effectively adjusted to the individual's perception. But this does not mean that the brain has stopped processing background stimuli. A word or sentence important to the individual will catch their attention and change their focus. This effect emphasizes how the information is filtered into our conscious or subconscious. For illustration, when I spoke to a friend of mine who was trained in piloting, he mentioned that he had difficulty with attention and focus at first when responding to the calls. They receive multiple calls at the same time within the ongoing communication on the monited channel in their environment. When he heard his name in the call, he said he could respond to the call he made by neutralizing other conversations. We call this a cocktail party effect. In 1953, Colin Cherry described the "cocktail party" problem. Thanks to the experiments, Colin was able to determine that separation of background noise was influenced by many variables, such as the direction of sound, the sound curtain, the rate of speech, and even the sex of the speaker. Cherry's experiments would have participants listening to two different messages from the same speaker at the same time. The audience would later have to separate different messages. This is now considered a dictator listening test, which is used to test selective attention.(Bonneau, 2018). For case, if you want to give another example, you have gathered the whole family for dinner. After dinner, everyone started chatting to the accompanimen of tea and dessert. You heard your name when you were chatting with someone, so when you realize someone's talking about you, you focus on that voice, and you hear the other sounds as humming. This action is an example of a auditory attention and dichotic listening task namely cocktail party effect.
If we define the perception briefly, it involves the sensation and the processing of what we hear. This also includes how we feel and how we interact with what we already know. For instance, cognitive psychology affects our perception. If you remember in the past years, a photo of a dress caused controversy. The issue was the color of the dress. The dress was white and gold or black and blue? At first I thought this was a joke because the dress was blue and black. It was impossible to see white and gold. There were thousands of comments under the photo. At certain intervals I entered the dress photo and looked at it from different angles, trying to see white and gold. Then I sent my friends a picture of the dress, and two people said it was white and gold. Two people who looked at the same picture from the same angle saw the dress in different colors. That was very surprising. Also, based on a study, we are less sensitive to blue light as we age, so we see the dress as white and gold.(Nietz, 2015). Another report described in the Daily States of science based on the theory of color consistency, is that if the dress is really blue and black, but the picture is taken in a room with blue shades, the blue may reflect a white color in the dress, which allows some people to see it as white and gold. In spite of, there are several views on dress perception, experts acknowledge that the only person who can determine the correct color of the dress is the person and producer brand who sees it personally. Sub-treatment approach is the process that begins with the stimulation of receptors.(Goldstein, 2010). Although we can all observe the fact that the dress is a dress, we see the dress differently. The reflection of color to the eye is pushing him to perceive in different colors. We recognize that the image is a dress, that our brains perceive it as a dress, and that our concentration is on the color, because everyone's perception is different and our brain recognizes it in different colors because it is displayed in our eyes. The clothes that started a discussion about 'what color this dress is' in the world belong to a British brand. The actual color of the dress is blue and black. This action is an example of visual perception and object recognition. Another example, the effect of context, the effect of word superiority was clearly revealed in a phenomenon.(Reicher,1969). In the investigation, a segregated letter such as K or a word such as work flashes briefly on the screen. The observer so had to select whether a D or K was demonstrated. A basic component of the experiment is that both options will create a valid word at the end of word. Thus, the observer's presentation does not automatically report the information contained in a word, which letter is presented to the observer. Even in this control, experimental findings suggest that K's detection is better than that presented in isolation when it is part of a word. This word is the effect of superiority. For example, I asked my friend for a class note during the midterm week and he sent me a photo of the notes. There were words you could not read. Instead of asking him, I read the sentence and tried to understand the meaning of the word. This action is an example of word regognition and word superiority effect. We are able to estimate the words in the sentence through context.
To sum up, cognitive psychology has an impact in many areas of our lives. The perception I described above, word recognition, cocktail party effect are some examples. Cognitive psychology makes it easier for us to make sense of our lives. It examines how people perceive, learn, remember and how they think.







References
Goldstein E. B. (2010). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience. Wadsworth Publishing.
McClelland, J., & Rumelhart, D. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception, part 1: An account of basic findings. Psychological Review, 108, 204-256.
Ögel Balaban(2018).PSY3005 Cognitive Psychology Cource.Perception and Object Recognition.
Prinzmetal, W. (1992). The word superiority effect does not require a T-scope. Perception & Psychophysics, 51, 473-484.
Stout, D. (2015). This may be why you’re seeing the dress as white and gold. Time Magazine. Retrieved from:
http://time.com/3725528/dress-explainer-white-gold-blue-black-science/
Tahir,U.(2014). Bilişsel Psikoloji Ders 2: Bilişsel Psikolojiye Giriş.Retrieved from:
https://slideplayer.biz.tr/slide/2313626/