While applied psychology has blossomed in recent years, research has continued to evolve. Ironically, two of the latest trends in research hark back a century to psychology's beginning, when psychologists were principally interested in consciousness and physiology.
Cognition refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge .
In other words, cognition involves thinking or conscious experience. During the1950s and 1960s, however, this situation slowly began to change. Advocates of the cognitive perspective point out that our manipulations of mental images surely influence how we behave. Consequently, focusing exclusively on overt behavior yields an incomplete picture of why we behave as we do. Equally important, psychologists investigating decision making, reasoning, and problem solving have shown that methods can be devised to study cognitive processes scientifically.