Describe some real life situations related to cognitive psychology.

Cognitive psychology studies areas which are related to real life situations like proof reading is related to pattern recognition, attention is related to taking our class notes, etc. The real life situation is studied by cognitive psychology in the domain of pattern recognition which shows that many times what we see is determined as much by the context in which it occurs as by what is actually there.

While taking notes in a class when teacher is delivering his lecture, we face difficulties of attention, which is also the domain of cognitive psychology. This domain explains how and why of this kind of difficulties.

Similarly, we can take another real life situation when we dial the telephone directory assistance for a telephone number without a pen in hand. We have to repeat the number in our mind until we have dialed the number. Another case related to remembering telephone number is that once we are told a telephone number and someone talks to us before we have dialed the number we again have to check the correctness of the number because of our forgetfulness which is caused due to temporary nature of the content of our short term memory. These are problems associated with the short term memory which cognitive psychology deals with.

Sometimes, it so happens that we are confronting a difficult maths sum or solving a puzzle. For an hour or so we are not able to solve it however hard we try. But when we take a break from the problem, we subsequently obtained a solution to it. In cognitive psychology, this phenomenon is called incubation effect. This is also an aspect of problem solving.

One more real life situation which comes under the domain of cognitive psychology is our behavior our eyesight on a foggy day. It has been observed that objects look farther away on foggy days than they really are. This discrepancy of perception may cause accidents as the, driver gets deceived about the real distance.