Information processing
The information processing approach constitutes an important paradigm in psychology,
which evolved from computer science and communication science as an alternative to
behaviorism, which was the most influential paradigm from the early decades until
the mid of the 20th century. Compared to behaviorist theories, in which observable
responses are conceptualized as a function of observable stimuli, theories in the
information processing domain focus on mental operations intervening between stimulus
and response. Within social psychology this approach emphasizes the cognitive mediation
of social behavior, and, vice versa, the social impact on cognitive processes. Personal
involvement, affective states, or environmental factors can have a considerable influence
on logical thinking, stereotyping, social judgments and decisions. The sequence of
cognitive processes are typically decomposed into various stages, such as perception,
encoding, organization, inference making, retrieval, and judgment. These stages are
highly interdependent and characterized by various feedback loops. At all stages,
the individual's expectations or older knowledge structures come to interact with new
input information. It is quite typical for human information processing that data-driven
processes ("bottom up") and conceptually driven processes ("top down") mesh
(see Fiedler, 1996).
See also:
cognition,
social cognition,
representation,
schema,
script
Literature:
Fiedler (1996),
Finske & Taylor (1991)
