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The Theory Of Cognitive Psychology Essay

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Whether you realize it or not, you are constantly employing cognitive processes in order to function throughout the day. The term for the study of these cognitive processes is cognitive psychology. Rutgers University defines cognitive psychology as “the scientific study of mind and mental function, including learning, memory, attention, perception, reasoning, language, conceptual development, and decision making”. One area of these cognitive processes is called wayfinding. It contains several cognitive processes such as knowing the relative location of a destination to the starting point, knowing where things are in the environment, making decisions about which destination to visit first, and which route to take to get to the destination. This literature review will attempt to lessen some of the disorder of the wayfinding field in order to focus on one specific cognitive process in wayfinding: route choice. In 2009, Wiener, Büchner, and Hölscher sought to categorize and explain the vast array of wayfinding tasks and the different cognitive resources required for the tasks (Wiener, Büchner, & Hölscher, 2009). The lack of categorization in the field has resulted in studies with ambiguous language that labels very different tasks as simply “wayfinding”. Navigation is made up of locomotion, which is response to one’s immediate surroundings i.e. steering, avoiding obstacles, and the approach of a visible object, and wayfinding, which is defined as “navigation in environmental

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