According to Stenberg and Stenberg (2017), cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that is concerned with mental processes, e.g. thinking, learning, memory, and perception, especially with respect to internal activities that take place between sensory stimulation and the explicit expression of behavior. In cognitive psychology, there are various research methods used in cognitive psychology. Each of the methods has different advantages and disadvantages that make them suitable for specific solutions and unsuitable for others. Some of the research methods used in cognitive psychology include case studies, experimental, neuroscientific observation, self-reporting, laboratory studies, surveys, and laboratory observations.

Case study approach is where is a situation that entails observing what happens to or reconstruction of the case history of a given participant or group of people. It is an inside and out investigation of specific circumstances different from a clear, measurable review. Advantages of this method are that it offers detailed information and insight for further research. Because of its in-depth approach, case studies tend to shed light on aspects of human behavior and thinking that may be impractical or unethical to study through other approaches. Another method is the naturalistic observation where researchers observe people in their natural settings. Naturalistic observations can be done with the consent and knowledge of those being watched or in a situation where those being observed are not aware that they are being viewed. This approach allows investigators to directly observe the subjects in a natural environment and give scientists a first-hand examination of the social behavior and to see things that they may not be able to see on a lab. These two methods are similar in the sense that they do not enable researchers to determine the cause of behaviors.

The article I have chosen is “a case of mistaken identity; the psychology of eyewitness memory.” This article explores the fundamental principles of memory, the accuracy of an eye witness, and the questioning techniques used by the police in the identification of eye witness in a criminal case. In this article, researchers studied the details of an actual series of attacks and subsequent police investigation. Researchers learn that memory is a reconstructive process instead of an accurate recording of events (Karen, 2010). The method was useful because researchers could understand various elements such as memory, witness identification, suggestive questioning, and lineup bias.

References

Karen Chambers (2010) A Case of Mistaken Memory? The Psychology of Eyewitness Memory. Department of Psychology & Communicative Disorders, National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science, University at Buffalo. Retrieved from http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/collection/detail.asp?case_id=357&id=357

Sternberg, K., & Sternberg, R. J. (2017). Intro to Cognitive Psychology. In Cognitive Psychology Seventh Edition (pp. 1-35). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.